Corbett vs. Dempsey

Peter Brötzmann
Wood & Water: Works on Paper
February 19 - March 27, 2010
Opening reception Friday, February 19, 2010
 

Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present its second solo exhibition of artwork by Peter Brötzmann. Brötzmann is perhaps best known as a musician, but has been consistently making and occasionally exhibiting visual art in Europe and America since 1959. In 2007, CvsD mounted the first major survey of Brötzmann's artwork in the United States, a show that focused heavily on his large paintings and constructions. Now, two years later, Wood & Water features his recent small-scale work on paper, including woodcut prints and watercolors.

Despite their difference in scale and media, these works maintain the elegant roughness that characterizes both Brötzmann's music and his larger artwork. Some of the subject matter is the same. For example, his interest in industrial and natural landscapes remains; the belching smokestacks and hump-backed steel bridges that surround Brötzmann's hometown of Wuppertal, Germany, are gouged out in one of his stark black and white woodcuts. Meanwhile, in his watercolors, Mother Nature's lumpy hills, heavy clouds, and skeletal trees are painted in gorgeous washes of black, purple, and gray. Brötzmann's material inventiveness is also on display here. Some of the pieces in the show make use of the textural and chromatic qualities of wrinkled foil wrappers, round paper pie plates, and instant coffee. These prints and paintings require only the simplest ingredients (wood, water, pigment, paper), but Brötzmann's skill lies in using them to create extraordinary formal complexity and raw emotional power.

Brötzmann's artwork has been shown sporadically around the world for decades, including a retrospective in Remscheid, Germany in 2005 and an exhibition of early work in Chicago in 2003. Brötzmann came of age in the 1960s at the same time as many of Germany's most famous artists, including Joseph Beuys and Georg Baselitz. Early on, he worked extensively with Nam Jun Paik and the Fluxus group, and since then he has performed musically all over the world. Until recently, he had maintained his art-making as a relatively private and personal occupation. The intimate artworks in this show are a window into Brötzmann's sustained accomplishment as a visual artist.

A full-color 36-page catalog will accompany the exhibition.

More works by Peter Brötzmann.

In the East Wing:

Harold Haydon
Crime & Punishment

In 1936, age 27, Chicago artist Harold Haydon set out to make an illuminated version of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 classic Crime & Punishment. His notion was to create ink drawings for the novel that would overlay the text on each page, illustrating the action, for instance, as Raskolnikov kills Alena or as he confesses to Sonya. The process began with rough sketches for a total of 10 sample pages. These were refined over several generations, then the final version was transferred to a typeset page, sitting right over the scene that to which the image referred.

For some reason, Haydon's illustrated Crime & Punishment was never brought to fruition. We are left with this very suggestive selection of ten finished proof pages, presented with some of the artist's initial sketches and a page of font calligraphy, displayed at Corbett vs. Dempsey and published in a 32-page catalog for the first time.

More works by Harold Haydon.