Corbett vs. Dempsey

Jeff Marlin
Paintings
January 22 - February 6, 2010
Opening reception Friday, January 22, 2010
 

My practice assumes the wreckage of history, both artistic and cultural, and is in no sense "pure." - Jeff Marlin

It is with great pleasure that Corbett vs. Dempsey presents paintings by Chicago artist Jeff Marlin. Spanning a period of about ten years, this survey includes various series in Marlin's oeuvre, which, in the artist's words, "...is always a dialogue between hand and machine systems." The selection of works extends back to early paintings exploring dot matrix disintegrations of images (UFOs, mushroom clouds, fascist architecture), all using scanned and manipulated photographic sources, Xeroxes and stencils in the development of the paintings. Out of these arose several subsequent lines of investigation, all of them leaving behind the image altogether in favor of quite minimal abstraction. One avenue of inquiry took him into what he called "soft grids," using palette knife and brush as well as printing and blotting with cardboard and string, creating what he described as "...surfaces which interrogate their means of productions without wholly repudiating them." Some recent paintings are clearly about surface and working process, drawing interest and ideas from the soft poetics of Robert Ryman and the white paintings that Robert Rauschenberg created in 1951.

Marlin was born in Chicago in 1969. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late '80s, working in depth with Ray Yoshida, graduating in 1991. Since that time, he woodshedded extensively, developing and refining his ideas in relative seclusion, showing only occasionally. Excited by Marlin's work, which we first saw in 2008, Corbett vs. Dempsey had planned on mounting a show in 2011. A terrible and tragic turn of events found Marlin direly ill with leukemia in the middle of 2009. Before he died in October, Marlin's CvsD show had been rescheduled for this winter (still hoping he would be able to attend), and together with Marlin work had been chosen for the exhibition. En route to hospice from the hospital, Marlin made a final stop at the studio to put the finishing touch on a last painting and feel the energy of the workplace one final time. The intensity of his commitment to his work, his passion, and his artistic achievement are great sources of inspiration, and CvsD is honored to show Jeff Marlin's outstanding paintings.

More works by Jeff Marlin.