EAST GARFIELD PARK — About 15 years ago, Chicago artist Gwendolyn Zabicki started noticing the word “enrobed” everywhere.
“I would say it started with these cookies,” Zabicki, 41, said. “Everything was enrobed in chocolate. Like, we weren’t dipping things or dunking things or covering things in chocolate. They were now enrobed. And it was this beautiful, fanciful word. It was so extravagant for cookies or pretzels … and that word just stuck with me.”
Zabicki, 41, started noticing other enrobed things — or “things covered in other things” — like an upholstered couch she saw left outside in Logan Square. As the seasons passed and the furniture sat in a neighbor’s backyard, it became enveloped in a “perfect and smooth” layer of snow, she said.
Zabicki tried painting the couch more than a decade ago and returned to it in 2023, which inspired the work in her upcoming exhibit, “Enrobed”: a melted popsicle covering a sidewalk, a phone light shining over a paletas cart menu, concentric halos of light seen around wet tree branches if it’s particularly humid.
“As a painter, you watch like, your skills keep growing, and you keep becoming better and better,” Zabicki said. “So I started with this painting, and I did it in 2023 with this couch covered in the blanket of snow.
“And then I was looking around for more things, and I’m like, ‘OK, things covered by things.’ And I just started seeing it everywhere and noticing it, and it became the theme for my show.”
While it took some time for Zabicki to hone in on her vision, much of the exhibit has ended up focusing on pleasure, she said. That’s what the word “enrobed” is all about to Zabicki — something “fanciful and decadent,” she said.
“The first couple ideas you have up for an idea, they’re not that good. But then the longer you stay with it, the weirder, more interesting variations come forward,” Zabicki said. “It’s something that’s kind of percolating in the back of your mind, and then you start to see it. … Taken as a whole, when you look at the show, the paintings are very much about pleasure. There’s a painting of a cake, there’s a person in a hammock, there’s people at the lake, there’s a popsicle.”
That’s a running theme in Zabicki’s body of work, which is largely inspired by “where your thoughts go when you’re not paying attention, when you have a moment of free time,” she said.
“Every now and then, I’m living my life and parts of these little songs trickle back into my mind,” Zabicki said. “They’re awful songs, but they’re stuff that my kindergarten teacher taught me how to do, or a shopping list, or your thoughts just bounce around. But that is a very large part of who we are and what it is to be alive, but that we don’t always share. We don’t have a chance to share it, and I’m interested in working at those things.”
Another of Zabicki’s “Enrobed” paintings is inspired by a group of young boys she passed while riding her bike.
“I saw some group of boys smoking a joint, and they were huddled in this circle,” Zabicki said. “It was obvious what they were doing there, because we’ve all done it, we’ve all been there, and it was very sweet. … I pedaled back, and I went up to them and asked them if I could make a painting of them. And they were all high at this point, but they were really open to the idea. … There’s one boy who’s like, slightly turned to the side, and he has a look on his face like, ‘Oh, please don’t bust us. Please don’t, oh middle-aged lady.'”
“Enrobed” opens Sunday in Gallery I of Goldfinch Gallery, 319 N. Albany Ave., and runs through Dec. 21.
