Robert Lostutter Garden

Opening reception: Friday, April 29, 6-8 PM

As spring is finally sprung, Corbett vs. Dempsey is very pleased to present Garden , an exhibition of new drawings by Robert Lostutter.  This is Lostutter’s third show with the gallery.

With his latest body of work, Lostutter forges deeper still into a indelible series of figurative images that he’s been conjuring for several decades.  The suite of male portraits – six large format drawings and five smaller ones – feature mutant figures, grafts of human and vegetable or avian elements.  Leaves sprout in the place of hair and merge with the features of the face; feathers flank the eyes like a subdermal masquerade ball mask.  As always, Lostutter’s technique is astonishing, imbuing the nearly monochromatic backdrops with a light, airy presence, against which the strange fellowship strikes ecstatic poses.  As indicated by its title, Garden is an outgrowth and extension of Lostutter’s last body of work, Garden of Opiates , a series of watercolor portraits of a related tribe of hybrid men.  Here the artist offers a single watercolor, “Masdevallia,” five views of a budding orchid introducing a quick, bright burst of color into the subtle black and white colony of figures.  The exhibition is accompanied by a 28-page catalog with a short essay by John Corbett and a poem by Lostutter.  Among numerous exhibitions, The Singing Bird Room of Robert Lostutter presented a 30-year survey of his work at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2012).