Felix Art Fair 2024

Press Release

Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present a cabana of curiosities, including the work of five artists: Jeff Perrone, Richard Wetzel, Philip Hanson, Ray Johnson, and Karl Wirsum.

Jeff Perrone

Based in New York until his untimely death in 2023, Jeff Perrone's work blurred distinctions between several axiomatic categories – craft/fine art, masculine/feminine, historical/contemporary. Also an acclaimed journalist and frequent contributor to Artforum, Perrone coined the term Pattern & Decoration, the name of the art movement with which he was most closely associated. In solo exhibitions at galleries including Cheim & Read, Holly Solomon Gallery, Sperone Westwater, and Charles Cowles Gallery, Perrone presented works that challenged those reified dichotomies, and in most of his late work he used clothing buttons – both cheap commercial and ultra-rare vintage ones – to spell out incisive, often politically explosive texts.

Richard Wetzel

In the 1960s, Richard Wetzel showed at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center as part of the Nonplussed Some, one of the original Imagist exhibition groups. His wildly inventive collages and back-painted Plexiglass works foreshadowed paintings and drawings from a decade later that moved into a realm of speculative fiction, with mutant combinations of insects and plants set in expansive landscapes. From amongst these come a group of exquisite works in graphite, some of which had associated paintings, in which pincered beetles and winged eggs cavort or do battle with tentacled peppers or menacing deer antlers.

Philip Hanson

Affiliated with the False Image, the same late-1960s Chicago Imagist exhibition group that included Roger Brown and Christina Ramberg, Philip Hanson is a key figure in the city's art community, both as a teacher and as a painter. Over the last three decades, Hanson's highly layered canvases have often featured text – a poem by Dickinson or a sonnet by Shakespeare – that resides in a ravishing vibratory context of high-key color and whorls of moving shapes. Some of these vivid works leave the words aside, allowing the excitement to be generated by the play of form, hue, and pentimenti.

Ray Johnson

One of the great underground figures in American art, Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a collage artist and founder of the New York Correspondence School, a primary force in the development of Mail Art. An inveterate recycler of his own work, including the important early "moticos" he made at the advent of Pop Art, Johnson frequently incorporated decades worth of fragments from older works into new collages, like the ones CvsD is presenting at Felix 2024.

Karl Wirsum

Among Ray Johnson's many correspondents was Chicago artist Karl Wirsum (1939-2021). Wirsum was a member of the Hairy Who, the first Imagist exhibition group, and he remained one of the most productive artists of his generation. Wirsum's vast oeuvre includes drawings, prints, sculpture, and paintings, but the germinal site of all of it was his sketchbooks, in which he made spectacular discoveries on a daily basis for six decades. In March, Wirsum will be the subject of tandem retrospective exhibitions in New York at Derek Eller Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery.