Jeff Perrone

Opening reception: Friday, September 9th, 6-8pm

In the East Wing, CvsD is delighted to present the first Chicago exhibition of Jeff Perrone. Debuting a previously unseen body of work, this exhibition features small and medium sized canvases, coarsely textured African mud cloth, onto which colorful buttons have been sewn. The buttons themselves are gorgeous, hand selected vintage ones collected over decades by Perrone, who carefully arranged them into sharply political, polemical, and sometimes aggressive texts. The jewel-like opulence and ingeniousness of the compositions is productively contradicted by the extremity and curtness of their multi-layered meanings. Born in Atwater, California, and active in New York since the 1970s, Perrone was a founding figure of the movement known as Pattern and Decoration. He showed with Charles Cowles Gallery in the ’80s, and has had solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater, Holly Solomon Gallery, and Cheim & Reid. Perrone is also a well-respected arts writer, and his 1976 Artforum essay “Approaching the Decorative” helped rethink the status of the decorative in contemporary art.