Robert Donley & Seymour Rosofsky

Press Release

In the second installation of North Gallery rotating exhibitions, Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present historical works by Robert Donley and Seymour Rosofsky.

Seymour Rosofsky (1924-1981) was an original member of the Monster Roster, Chicago's postwar artistic enclave dedicated to brutal figurative expressionism. A fierce and fearless painter whose work was widely exhibited and collected in the 1950s and '60s, Rosofsky was also highly political, sometimes directly so, and he was sympathetic to a vehement anti-war sentiment in the late '60s that included various other Chicagoans, like Robert Donley (b. 1934). Donley was personally involved in a variety of anti-war actions including the artist march on the bloody 1968 Democratic National Convention; he was a director of the Artists Collaborative, which created the Protest Papers, a bound book of anti-Vietnam prints in which he also had a work.

In this exhibition, CvsD presents an important canvas by Rosofksy, Vietnam, Chicago, Czechoslovakia. Painted in 1968, it features a sinister figure smiling and crushing tiny people in its fists, flanked by mushroom clouds and looming over maps of the three titular sites, each one the scene of violent anti-democratic events. Each of the geographical locations is marked as a grave with a cross. This powerful piece will be haunted by a group of Donley's sculptural works.  Although he's best known as a painter, Donley has amassed a small oeuvre of 3-D works dating back to his stint in Southern California in the early 1960s. By turns grotesque and elegant, they incorporate found doll parts, wood, string, metal or fabric mesh, and other evocative flotsam into fascinating fetishes, overpainted with muscular gobs or a fine finish.  These works, mostly executed in the 1970s, sublimate political energy into an abstract form, energizing the objects most powerfully, situating them somewhere between stillness and rage.