Dominick Di Meo Good Night, Good Mourning

Press Release

Opening Friday, June 20th, 5:00-8:00pm

It is with pleasure that Corbett vs. Dempsey kicks off the Fall season with Good Night, Good Mourning, 1974-1984 , an exhibition of work by Dominick Di Meo.  This is the artist’s third solo show at CvsD.

Di Meo (b. 1927) first emerged as an artist in Chicago during the late 1940s, when he was associated with like-minded figurative expressionists like Leon Golub and George Cohen.  Deeply psychological, Di Meo’s work exhibited a lighter sensibility couched in a morbid exterior.  After he relocated to New York at the end of the 1960s, Di Meo’s playful side came more fully forward, as the work literally grew lighter, from a dark, often black, palette, to a pale, often whitewashed look.  For a decade starting in the mid 1970s, he made an expansive group of works utilizing tiny putty heads, sculpted with open mouths and pinhole eyes, ranging in relief over pock-marked canvases or lined up on 3-dimensional sculptures.  Extending his interest in shrines and fetishes, these sculptures were a new addition to his repertoire, the aggregated little heads lending them a deranged feel, like aghast smiley faces at an Aztec ritual ceremony.  As ever, in these works and associated drawings and paintings, Di Meo is formally resourceful, a master of texture and a ruthless experimenter with materials.  Twenty-two of these works were shown at an exhibition at P.S.1 in New York in 1982, but they have remained otherwise unseen.  This will be their first exhibition in Chicago.

Good Night, Good Mourning, 1974-1984 is accompanied by a 56-page catalog, with a short essay by John Corbett.

Artist Page