Corbett vs. Dempsey

When she died in 2003, age 100, Chicago painter Eve Garrison had lived an astonishing artistic life that spanned nearly 80 productive years. By the time she graduated from the School of the Art Institute in 1930, Garrison was already considered one of the best figure painters in the city; she won a gold medal for figure painting at the Corcoran in 1933. Her nudes and portraits were widely exhibited in Chicago and elsewhere; she had her first one-man show at the Denver Art Museum in 1934. In '33 and '34, she painted an astounding series of Chicago cityscapes and Colorodo landscapes, and a few years later she travelled widely in Mexico, painting vivid landscapes of the cities and towns. In the early '40s, her work gradually began to shift, moving into increasingly abstract terrain; she painted a cluster of cubism-influenced surrealist paintings in the mid '40s, then began to heavily work her surfaces, scarring the canvas and board, layering and scraping away, but still dealing primarily with figures. Gallery exhibitions in New York in the early '50s spotlit these psychologically probing techniques, and around this time she began to explore an even more dramatic method of texturing that she called "sculptured oil," using assemblage elements (tin can lids, string, peach stones, crushed paper bags, glass, wood) as a ground, somewhere between Jean Dubuffet's haute patte paintings and Robert Rauschenberg's "combine" paintings. In this period, Garrison had numerous one-person shows, including the Milwaukee Art Center and Miami Museum of Modern Art. She continued exploring into the '60s, when she showed her wildly energetic Op Art pieces in London and Paris. Her work from the last three decades of her life is as strong and uncompromising as anything she did prior.

A profound and prolific artist,Garrison left an incredibly varied and rich archive of work.

Corbett vs. Dempsey is proud to represent the Eve Garrison estate. Please inquire if you would like to see more of her work.