Suellen Rocca Buy More Diamonds: Selected Drawings

Press Release

In the North Gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey is proud to present Suellen Rocca, Buy More Diamonds: Selected Drawings. This is the gallery's second exhibition with the artist and the first presentation of her work in Chicago since her death in 2020.

One of the original Imagist artists, Suellen Rocca (1943-2020) was among the great originals in Chicago's contemporary art history. A member of the Hairy Who, Rocca exhibited with the group at the Hyde Park Art Center in the second half of the 1960s, activities that were given a detailed revisiting in the Art Institute of Chicago's 2018 exhibition Hairy Who? 1966-1969. Rocca's approach to composition, which often revolved around typological grids or scatterings of disparate, icon-like images, was one of Imagist art's most radical contributions. Even on canvas, these images were linear, drawn, as it were, in paint. Rocca's parallel drawing activities were central to her practice, and her works on paper, often very elaborate, are among her most incisive achievements. Full of humor, sometimes with a baudy, maudlin, or grotesque overtone, her "catalogue" compositions did indeed draw on commercial gazettes like the Sears catalog, but also on the cellular structure of comic strips and the multiplicitous spatial inventions of Hieronymous Bosch. In this rare roundup of some of Rocca's most outstanding drawings, CvsD presents a selection of works on paper from 1965-1991. It is an honor to collaborate with the Rocca family and Matthew Marks Gallery in this exhibition, which is especially meaningful for us as it hearkens back to the two-person show CvsD mounted in 2007 with Suellen and Art Green, Imagist Hits, Vol. 1.