Events
Frank Vavruska
The Horizon is a Circle
Paintings 1942 - 1956
July 11 - August 23, 2008
opening reception Friday, July 11, 5 - 9 pm
Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present the first one-person exhibition of Frank Vavruska’s work in nearly 40 years.
Frank Vavruska was born in 1917 in Antigo, Wisconsin, to Czech parents. He studied art at University of Wisconsin (1935-38) and the Art Institute of Chicago (1938-41), where he took a BFA and was awarded the Ryerson Traveling Fellowship, which enabled him to paint and travel in Mexico (1941-42, again 1945-46). While hospitalized in England in the US Army during WWII, Vavruska produced many paintings which were the basis for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945. In 1947, a painting of his (“Cows in a Tropical Landscape”) was selected for the important Abstraction & Surrealism in American Art exhibition, curated by Frederick Sweet and Katharine Kuh at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the piece was reproduced in the show’s catalog.
Primarily based in Chicago, Vavruska was a nomad at heart. He worked for two years in the Yucatan Peninsula, was commissioned to make a mural for the Archeological Museum in Campeche, and developed an avid interest in the archeological richness of the region. Vavruska lived in Europe for six years, mainly in southern France, and he traveled in North Africa, Italy, Paris, and spent a year in London. In the late ‘40s, his work began to shift from its expressionist and cubist figurative basis – incorporating elements from Miro, Picasso, and Klee, as well as Kahlo and Rivera – towards a purer form of abstraction, and his work from the early ‘50s bears some resemblance to the work of CoBrA artists of Northern Europe, some of which he may have seen at the time. The other point of reference during this fertile period, in which Vavruska temporarily relocated from Chicago to New York, are the totemic abstractions of Adolph Gottlieb. Vavruska’s beautiful, rough abstract paintings were included in exhibitions at the Metropolitan (American Painting Today, 1950), Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1957), Madison Square Garden (Art U.S.A., 1958), and elsewhere. Much too young, Vavruska died in 1974, age 56.
An 80-page full color catalog accompanies the exhibition.
Dominick Di Meo
Man in the Moon
Paintings, Drawings, & Reliefs 1947 - 1974
May 16 - June 28, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, May 16, 5 - 9 p.m.
It is with great anticipation that Corbett vs. Dempsey presents a rare exhibition of work by one of Chicago’s most influential and original artists, Dominick Di Meo.
An inspiration to subsequent artists, including Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, and Art Green, Di Meo is one of Chicago’s key transitional figures and an artist of immense power and sensitivity. One of the original members of the so-called Monster Roster, a 1950s group of Chicago artists that included Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Cosmo Campoli, George Cohen, June Leaf, Ted Halkin, and Seymour Rosofsky, Di Meo’s Chicago-era work was ferociously unique and personal. His early paintings and drawings featured stressed, existentially tormented figures. He was deeply moved by his encounters with the catacombs of Mexico and Rome, and his dark, haunting images began to acquire a set of common icons, which included skulls and disarticulated limbs and bones. By the late ‘50s, Di Meo was making reliefs, utilizing papier-maché, plastic wood, layers of vinyl and plaster. In 196, Di Meo spent a year in Italy, traveling, living in Florence, and working feverishly on his reliefs. When he returned to Chicago, he began painting large scale, creating a stunning series of works that combine synthetic polymer and various methods of stenciling. Playful and somewhat lighter in tone, but still possessed of a dark sense of humor, these glorious works were the last ones Di Meo showed during his tenure in Chicago.
For this, Corbett vs. Dempsey’s first exhibition of Di Meo’s work, the selection concentrates on the first quarter century of his development, including the key pieces he made while living in Chicago. To celebrate his reintroduction, CvsD has produced a 100-page catalog documenting his achievement. Robert Cozzolino, Curator of Modern Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, aptly titled his catalog essay: “Where Have You Been All My Life, Dominick Di Meo?”
ISOBEL STEELE MACKINNON
Weimar Portraits
Riviera Landscapes
A Chicagoan in Hofmann’s Studio 1925–1929
March 28 – May 3, 2008
Isobel Steele MacKinnon’s (1896-1972) adventures as an American artist living and working in Europe echo those of many other expatriates of the epoch. What the couple encountered from 1925 to 1929 in the studio of German artist Hans Hofmann would rock the impressionist foundations of their artwork and transform them into committed modernists. In Chicago, MacKinnon’s approach had been relatively conventional, but under Hofmann she took to the new ideas with startling ease, absorbing his “push and pull” spatial concept and his deep investigations of the compositional consequences of hot and cold colors.
The exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey is drawn from the work MacKinnon produced during this exceptional period. It includes portraits, charcoal figure drawings, and the bright landscapes of Capri and St. Tropez painted during MacKinnon’s summer travels with Hofmann.
James Garrett Faulkner & Thomas H. Kapsalis
Collages & Paintings
February 15 - March 22, 2008
Two divergent lineages out of modernism are represented in this survey of recent works by Chicago mainstays Faulkner and Kapsalis. James Garrett Faulkner’s exquisitely strange collages build on the traditions of Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, while Tom Kapsalis’s painted geometric abstractions descend from constructivism and the Bauhaus.
Philip Hanson: Organ Music
January 11 - February 9, 2008
One of the original Chicago imagist painters, Philip Hanson continues explore vivid new ideas in his most recent work. For his highly anticipated second show at CvsD, Hanson presents a new series of explosively colorful abstractions, investigating the vibrational energies of hue and intensity, as well as a new batch of text-based works based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and others. A 36-page catalog will be available.
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In the East Wing:
Lester O. Schwartz: Projection & Recession Paintings,
1940s & 1950s
A small collection of ravishing geometric abstractions by Wisconsin’s mid-century modernist master Lester O. Schwartz (1912-2006) will be featured in the East Wing, in collaboration with NavtaSchulz Gallery.
Ralph Arnold - Who You/Yeah Baby
December 7, 2007-January 5, 2008
Until his death in 2005, painter, printmaker, and collage artist Ralph Arnold was a subtle and masterful manipulator of image and identity. The Chicagoan’s early works, from the 1950s and early 1960s, were steeped in a earth-toned postwar vocabulary, while his work from the mid-60s utilized elements of neo-Dada and Pop Art, incorporating text fragments and detourned advertising images into a personal lexicon that drew on his experience as an African-American artist and Korean War vet. Corbett vs. Dempsey’s debut exhibition of Arnold concentrates on works from the first quarter century of his oeuvre. A 56-page full-color catalog will be available.
Peter Brötzmann - Paintings & Objects
October 26-November 30
Renowned internationally as a musician, saxophonist and clarinetist Peter Brötzmann has maintained a parallel life as a visual artist. His first exhibitions took place in Europe during the early 1960s, when he also worked with Nam June Paik and participated in Fluxus events. His efforts as a painter and fabricator of objects have been featured in periodic exhibitions, including a 2005 retrospective in Remscheid, Germany, and a show of very early works in Chicago two years prior. This is the first major survey of Brötzmann’s recent work in the U.S., featuring large format works on canvas and small scale assemblages, as well as an assortment of older pieces. A 100-page full-color catalogue will be available. In the East Wing, CvsD spotlights new paintings on cardboard by Stephen Lapthisophon, the perfect complement to Brötzmann’s elegantly rough-hewn aesthetic.
JIMMY WRIGHT & MARK MULHERN
paintings and monoprints
July 13-September 2, 2007
Ex-Chicagoan, NYC-resident Jimmy Wright shows for the second time with CvsD, this time in tandem with the wondrous Milwaukee painter Mark Mulhern. Both are resplendent painters who sometimes work large and draw out the brilliance and hidden pleasures of everyday experience. And Wright and Mulhern are also both accomplished monoprint-makers; these will also be on exhibit in this breezy summer show. A selection of the “lost women” painted by Wright in the late ‘60s – small, delicate watercolors on rice-paper whose larger oil counterparts suffered a tragic fate in a house fire – will be shown and will be the subject of a 24-page catalog, with text by Kelly Hogan.
Ted Halkin
First In, Last Out
May 18-June 30
With Katie Kahn in the East Wing
Ted Halkin is one of the most venerable and versatile figures in the history of Chicago art. Since he first exhibited as a member of the so-called Monster Roster artists of the early 1950s, Halkin has worked continuously to grow and change, and in his eighties he has remained a vibrant and active artist with a highly personal approach to abstraction. This unique exhibit will put his very earliest artworks - many long unseen - next to his very newest creations. In the gallery’s East Wing, Katie Kahn will exhibit her beguiling, wonderful recent drawings, which are executed on newspaper, utilizing the underlying images as part of their composition.
Bold Saboteurs
Collage & Construction in Chicago
April 6-May 12
Throughout its history, Chicago has enjoyed many different strands of artists committed to collage - formalists sparked by the challenges of Cubism, data scramblers and psychological subversives who extrapolated on Dada and Surrealism, and a generation of abstract artists inspired by the constructivism of the Bauhaus, the explosiveness of abstract expressionism, and the lyricism of Joseph Cornell. This survey is dedicated to the full expanse of collage, assemblage and construction in Chicago, from the 1930s to the present. Artists include: Ralph Arnold, Ronald Ahlström, Morris Barazani, Harry Bouras, Jim Faulkner, Robert Nickle, Tony Fitzpatrick, Gladys Nilsson, Lil Rammel, Hal Rammel, Ray Yoshida, Ed Flood, Eve Garrison, Fred Berman, Martin Hurtig, Thomas Kapsalis, John Sparagana, Vera Berdich, Tim Howe, Phyllis Kresnoff and George Cohen.
A 24-page catalog will be available at the opening.
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Imagist Classic Hits Vol. 1
Art Green & Suellen Rocca
Feb. 23-March 31
The debut of a new series of exhibits exploring the rich history of Chicago Imagist art, this show focuses on two seminal figures from the original Hairy Who exhibition group. Suellen Rocca’s daring, rich drawings and paintings manipulate and recontextualize a set of repeated icons - palm trees, women’s handbags, disarticulated limbs, dancing couples, diamond rings - in dynamic, dense and highly complex fields. Green’s paintings are also spectacular feats of compositional prowess, with perspectival nods at de Chirico and a hilarious undercurrent of visual jokes and puzzles. IMAGIST CLASSIC HITS VOL. 1 presents works from the formative period of each artist, including pieces from the original 1966-67 Hairy Who shows.
A 24-page catalog will be available at the opening.
Gina Litherland
Recent Paintings
Jaunary 12, 2006 - February 17, 2006
Opening reception Friday, January 12,
5-9 PM
In her magnificently detailed and inventive paintings, Gina Litherland extends a tradition of Midwest surrealism and magic realism that stretches back to the ‘30s and ‘40s and the work of Gertrude Abercrombie, Sylvia Fein, Julia Thecla and John Wilde. Born in Gary, Indiana, Litherland has been active in the visual arts since the mid 1970s, exploring photography, performance, and painting. From 1979 to 1982 she participated in weekly experimental multi-media performances at the Emergency Theatre in Chicago. Long a resident of Chicago, she studied painting at the School of the Art Institute, and her paintings, drawings, and articles have been published worldwide in journals and periodicals associated with the international surrealist movement. Her essay on the connections between creative activity and the natural world, “Imagination & Wilderness,” appeared in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, published by University of Texas Press. Litherland’s recent work was the subject of a museum exhibition at the James Watrous Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters in Madison in 2006.
On view in CvsD’s East Wing:
Anna P. Baker
A Taxi for the General
1960s Paintings
Joseph Friebert, Fred Berman,
and the Milwaukee Scene
1935-1965
December 1, 2006 - January 6, 2007
Opening reception Friday, December 1,
5-9PM
Chicago’s great working-class neighbor to the north, Milwaukee is the home of a longstanding and powerful artistic legacy. This exhibition will feature the work of several generations of interrelated artists, focusing on painters Joseph Friebert (1908-2002) and Fred Berman (b. 1926). On view will be Friebert’s social realist paintings of the ‘40s, including a series of devastating holocaust images, and his increasingly abstract architectural works of the ‘50s, which were chosen by curator Katherine Kuh for the seminal 1956 Venice Biennale (which was topically titled “American Artists Paint the City”). Berman’s “White Cathedral” was selected for the same exhibition, and Berman’s paintings and assemblages, which in some ways pick up on the groundwork that Friebert constructed, will also be a core part of this show. The exhibit will also include work by Gerrit Sinclair, Alfred Sessler, Robert von Neumann and others.
Full-color catalog.
Abstract Imagist
October 27-November 25
Opening reception October 27, 5-9PM
Exploring abstract works by Chicago artists affiliated with and on the margins of the Imagist tradition. This exhibition, the first of its kind, will challenge the prevailing notion that Chicago Imagist art is exclusively figurative and narrative, looking at less well-known Abstract Imagist artists (Jordan Davies, Ed Flood, Murray Simon, Sarah Canright, Ray Siemanowsky) as well as abstract tendencies in work by some of the movement’s celebrities (Miyoko Ito, David Sharpe, Art Green, Ray Yoshida), and looking back at influential precursors (Ted Halkin, Thomas Kapsalis) and at the tradition as it manifests itself in the present (Philip Hanson, Bruce Thorn).
Full-color 24 page catalog.
September 8-October 14
Contemplating a Roller
Max Kahn/Eleanor Coen
Major Works
April 7-May 6
MARGOT BERGMAN
wonderland & other reveries
paintings 1995-2005
Corbett vs. Dempsey is proud to present a solo exhibition of recent work by painter Margot Bergman. Active in Chicago since the late 1950s, Bergman presents selections from two series, the Wonderland paintings and her slightly older Other Reveries series.
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ROBERT AMFT
MAJOR WORKS
1940s & 1950s
In his first one-man exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Robert Amft’s work from the period of the 1940s and 1950s, including monumental paintings such as “King Kong” (1939) and “Landscape With Crow” (1947-48) as well as a selection of never-seen watercolors, will fill the gallery.
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NEW ACQUISITIONS &
GALLERY ARTISTS
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SUSAN FRANKEL
in the east wing
January 13-February 12
Recent arrivals to CvsD including work by Gertrude Abercrombie, Jean Crawford Adams, Fritzi Brod, Francis Chapin, Eleanor Coen,
Jordan Davies, Robert Donley, Susanne Doremus, Leon Golub, Philip Hanson, Richard Hull, Miyoko Ito, Max Kahn, Ellen Lanyon, Robert Lostutter, Jim Lutes, John Miller, Murray Simon, Ray Siemanowski, Joseph Stella, Jimmy Wright, Frank Vavruska and others.
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Briggs Dyer & Paul LaMantia
Inside Out
Drawings and Paintings of the '60s
December 3, 2005-January 7, 2006
An early acolyte of influential painter Francis Chapin, Briggs Dyer was originally a painter of the Midwest landscape and Chicago cityscape, working under the realist style known as American Scene painting.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color 24-page catalog with essays by John Corbett and Jim Dempsey.
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Four WPA Muralists in Their Studios
(1925-1945)
Henry Simon, Ethel Spears, Rainey Bennett &
Mitchell Siporin
October 22-November 26
These four artists were all well known as Chicago muralists, contributing paintings to public buildings across the Midwest and elsewhere during the period of the Works Progress Administration.
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Philip Hanson
Etymology
Recent Paintings and their Roots
September 9-October 15
One of the original Chicago Imagist painters, Philip Hanson showed in the late ‘60s with Roger Brown and Christina Ramberg as part of a group known as the False Image. He remains one of Chicago’s most original artists, though his work hasn’t been shown extensively over the last decade.
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Six Rings
July 1-August 27
Corbett vs. Dempsey's summer show this year takes on the idea of the multi-ring circus, consisting of six independent simultaneous exhibits, each tightly focused on a specific group of works by one artist.
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WALTER HAHN
1950s paintings and drawings
May 13-June 18, 2005
Early in the 1950s, WALTER HAHN was a force to be reckoned with in Chicago painting. In 1951, his final year as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Hahn won first prize in oil in the Chicago and Vicinity exhibition.
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ANATOMICALLY CORRECT WOMAN
April 8-May 7, 2005
Ann Starr paints, draws and makes artist-books that deal with the ambiguities and wonders of the medicalized body. Born in New York City in 1937, raised in California, Linda Kramer has been an important figure in Chicago's art scene since the late '60s, when her work was selected for the Art Institute's Chicago and Vicinity Show.
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CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE/NORTH SIDE
1950s Paintings by Walter Sanford & Jerry Pinsler
exhibition opening February 25
Emphasizing both the diversity and dividedness of Chicago's art scene, this show spotlights two great abstract painters who worked at the same time in the same city, painting in styles that were not too distant, without knowing one another.
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Corbett vs. Dempsey presents:
EYE & EAR ARTIST - MUSICIAN
December 3, 2004-January 15, 2005
This group exhibition assembles a wide-ranging assortment of artwork by musician-artists and artist-musicians, both historical and contemporary, exploring myriad ways that passage between the visual and the sonic can serve as a creative catalyst.
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Jimmy Wright an Overview
October 15-November 6, 2004
Paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints by one of the unsung early Chicago imagists, Jimmy Wright (b. 1944, Kentucky), now a renowned New York artist, spotlighting his rarely seen work from the '60s and early '70s.
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EVE GARRISON
CHICAGO WPA CITYSCAPES
1932-1940
September 10-October 3
Eve Garrison's beautiful, gritty paintings and drawings of the city of Chicago are the focus of Corbett vs. Dempsey's first major exhibition.
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