Chris Miller reviews Vera Klement: Early and Late Style and William Conger: New Paintings at Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, on view through February 23, 2013.

Miller writes that "aesthetically, these two artists definitely complement each other… [Conger’s] pictorial energy has intensified within the smaller twelve-by-twenty-inch squares that he has filled with dynamic patterns barely constrained by their borders. Their logic of design seems at the edge of comprehensibility, making them at once intriguing and annoying… Klement’s paintings go in the opposite direction, looking inward instead of out. And, whereas Conger presents well-crafted surfaces of precisely defined edges, thicknesses and tones, Klement seems to working with blasts of insight—eureka moments of understanding where for a flashing instant, outside and inside are one. It’s as if the act of comprehension itself is being comprehended…"