Corbett vs. Dempsey

Robert Barnes
Paradise
May 14 - June 19, 2010
Opening reception Friday, May 14, 2010, 5 - 9 p.m.

Robert Barnes has been a towering figure in Chicago art since he lived, boxed, and painted here a half-century ago. Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present his first solo exhibition of paintings in ten years, featuring a suite of large and small canvases based on competing notions of paradise.

Barnes (b. 1934) is one of the great iconoclastic individualist painters. A dedicated figurative artist, he starts each work as an abstraction, drawing the scene forward, introducing characters, setting, objects, action. His lifelong involvement in literature - particularly the work of James Joyce, whose stream-of-consciousness writing is echoed in the painter's process - is everywhere evident in his allusive, often narrative inventions, and his paintings, even when at their most mysterious and opaque, are distinctly theatrical. They mediate between a pugnacious, sometimes explosive component (perhaps congruent with Barnes' early experience as winner of the Golden Gloves in the flyweight division on the south side of Chicago) and a delicate, subtle, intellectually acute and highly poetic sensibility. Rich, layered, complex, sometimes dense with motion, each painting is a virtuoso event, a landmark, go-for-broke performance.

In "Paradise," Barnes sets his sights on utopian concepts, from the Biblical Garden of Eden to the Irish mythological land of Mag Mell. In five large-scale oils, he ranges from the medieval paradise known as the Land of Cockaigne (home, in an American folk context, of the Big Rock Candy Mountain) to the opium trade, as well as King Arthur's legendary Avelon. Each of these lush, sumptuous works contains a kernel of bliss, a glimpse of core content, a meditation on the myth of a state or place of complete and constant perfection, as observed by one of America's keenest and most astute artists.

A 16-page catalog will accompany the exhibition.

More works by Robert Barnes.

In the East Wing:

Simone Shubuck
Recent Drawings

In the gallery's East Wing, CvsD features new drawings by Simone Shubuck. Based in New York, Shubuck has shown her wild, delicate, vivid colored-pencil works with Zach Feuer (LFL), and Jack Hanley Gallery. In brilliant, peacock-like flourishes one can see evocations of Philip Guston, Lee Godie, and Florine Stettheimer.

More works by Simone Shubuck.

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