Corbett vs. Dempsey

John Sparagana
Between the Eyes
March 18 - April 30, 2011
Opening reception Friday, March 18
5 - 8 p.m.
 

In his first one-man show at Corbett vs. Dempsey, John Sparagana presents a startling new body of work as hard-hitting as it is subtle, rich, and elegant. Between the Eyes extends Sparagana's longstanding practice of intervening in media images. The eight new pieces presented are large-scale - the size of hefty paintings - and all use a complex system of cutting, interdigitating, and interrupting magazine page images, opening up a profoundly revealing, deeply poetic new vision. Each piece grapples with the informational content of a news image, slicing and dicing and further pummeling it; the image is then overlayed with another one drawn from the canon of pop and post-minimal abstraction. Scenes from Haiti and Afghanistan jostle with shapes and forms from Helio Oiticica, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Andy Warhol. Sparagana is a well-known figure in Chicago and beyond. A book on his work, Sleeping Beauty, with an extensive essay by art historian Mieke Bal, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2008.

This exhibition is accompanied by a 44-page catalog with essays by art-historian Graham Bader, artist David Schutter, and CvsD's John Corbett.

In the East Wing:
Tim Berresheim & Matthias Schaufler

In the East Wing, CvsD presents a double debut of two outstanding German artists showing in Chicago for the first time. Tim Berresheim subverts traditional media - painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture - creating Duchampian painting-objects that confound the eye and tease the brain. A whipping, hair-like image cavorts atop a woodgrain background in these one-of-a-kind prints. Matthias Schaufler is a painter and collage-maker based in Berlin. Working with a soft, pastel palette, his highly expressive, figurative paintings are sly and oblique, refracting meaning. Like Berresheim, Schaufler showed with Albert Oehlen ("Leg Show," Patrick Painter, Santa Monica, 2007).