Artist Mike Cloud @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago - "Circle Chat" Exhibition

Mike Cloud: Circle Chat

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

March 7 - April 26, 2025

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Circle Chat, an exhibition of new paintings by MIKE CLOUD. This is the gallery's first show with the artist.

Mike Cloud (b. 1974) is a Chicago-based artist whose complex and vibrant paintings often utilize conventional support materials organized in unconventional ways. Stretcher bars, normally brought together at perpendicular angles, are instead conjoined into star or diamond shapes, one sometimes crossing in front of another like a highway offramp; canvas may be affixed to the front of the bar, rather than stretched around it, and thin strips of canvas might cross the field like streamers or banners. Are Cloud's paintings abstract? This is a complicated question to address. Are they representational? Yes, they represent specific and concrete things in the world – people, places, objects. Do they represent these things through visual likeness? Not so much. Instead, Mike Cloud invokes other forms of semiosis, producing meanings through a variety of means – written language, linguistic permutations, website urls, hieroglyphs, pictograms, and other symbolic imagery such as hand-birds. Again, are they abstract? Yes, Cloud's paintings are abstract in the sense that they condense vast amounts of information into a limited space. In the new works presented in Circle Chat, Mike Cloud has included two canvases that utilize hinges to fold into floor sculptures, one hinged horizontally like a construction site sign ("Oyster Oil"), the other hinged vertically, sitting on the floor like a scrim ("Kingdom of Luang Phrabang"). Highly specific, yet mysterious and spring-loaded, these virtuosic, operatic works are ultimately meditations on the fundaments of painting – color, facture, form, speed – and the relationship between the act of interpretation and being in the world.  

Mike Cloud's solo exhibitions include: Thomas Erben Gallery, NY (2014, 2019, 2024); The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL (2017); Max Protetch Gallery, NY (2008); MoMA PS1, NY (2005). His work has been included in group exhibitions such as Good Weather, Chicago, IL; the American Academy of Arts in Letters, NYC, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovak Republic; White Columns, NYC, NY; Honor Fraser Gallery, CA; Ceysson & Bénétière, NYC, NY; Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; Good Children Gallery, LA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; White Columns, NY; Max Protetch, NY; Apexart, NYC.    

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

Arch Connelly @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago - "Arch Connelly: The Future Reflected, Wallworks 1981–1991" Exhibition

Arch Connelly

The Future Reflected, 

Wallworks 1981–1991

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

March 7 - April 26, 2025

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Arch Connelly: The Future Reflected, Wallworks 1981–1991. This is the first solo exhibition of Connelly's work in Chicago and his first gallery show since his death.

Born in Chicago, ARCH CONNELLY (1950-1993) attended graduate school at Southern Illinois University (SIU), in Carbondale, Illinois, where he majored in ceramics. In the mid 1970s, Arch Connelly lived in San Francisco, where he was associated with the gay performance troupe Angels of Light, together with fellow artist Martin Wong, and designed sets for the Cockettes. Settling in New York in 1980, Arch Connelly quickly became an important new figure on the East Village art scene, starting with a solo exhibition at Artists Space and continuing with four solo shows at the legendary Fun Gallery, among other venues including White Columns, Holly Solomon Gallery, and Castelli Graphics. 

Arch Connelly charted a very personal terrain in his work, using faux pearls, silk, sequins, glitter, and shattered eggshells to create what Rene Ricard called "space age surrealism," a sort of alchemical admixture of materials and images, embracing kitschy opulence by raising it to a new altitude and forcing it into a complex new identity.  "Connelly pushes this decadence just one step further," wrote artist Jeff Perrone. "Where formal rigor turns dark, into an area where the bubbly takes an ominous tinge, into the arena of fin-du-siecle stage setting, blatantly theatrical, paintings like heavy velvet curtains ready to part, waiting for action to begin." 

Decades ahead of his time, exploring an explicitly queer aesthetic in a manner that could easily be mistaken for something brand new, Connelly made oval and circular smiley-face canvases as well as gay porn collages, all constructed out of fabulously shimmering and cheaply obtained materials. With a career on the rise, one of Connelly's porn collages graced the cover of the November 1991 issue of Artforum. 

Tragically, he died of AIDS less than two years later, at age 43. 

Although he has been seen in recent group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as being the subject of an in-depth survey at SIU last year, this is the first solo exhibition of Arch Connelly's work in the city of his birth and the first commercial gallery presentation to showcase his artwork since his untimely passing, spotlighting rare collages and major works on canvas, focused specifically on his wall-hanging compositions.  

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

January 24 - March 1, 2025

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon, an exhibition of new paintings and multi-media works. This is Oehlen’s fifth show with the gallery and Gordon’s first exhibition in Chicago.

In this exhibition, German-born artist Albert Oehlen presents three monumental pieces on shaped aluminum. With enamel paint marks applied directly to the raw substates, which are cut into “omega” shapes similar to those of some newer Oehlen works, these 12-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide metal paintings come equipped with sonic transducers on each of their four adjacent panels. When amplified, the paintings act as de facto speakers and project sound vibrations into the room. Oehlen invited Kim Gordon to make soundtracks for the works. She developed these sound recordings in direct material relationship with the paintings, using the transduced metal plates as amplifiers for her electric guitar. Rather than simply making these sounds for the paintings, she made the sounds on them. Gordon’s bracing improvisations, lasting around 8-minutes each, explore a wide range of colors, from chords, drone, and feedback to electrical noises made with the unplugged guitar cord. The works play intermittently, erupting energetically, then relaxing into silence, their metal forms and the gestural lines inscribed on them supercharged by Gordon’s music. In addition to these three works made collaboratively by the two artists, the exhibition presents a new canvas by Albert Oehlen and a group of small, vibrant paintings by Kim Gordon.

Based between Switzerland, Berlin, Spain, and Los Angeles, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) is one of the most widely-celebrated contemporary artists. His work has adopted and invented numerous approaches to painting and more recently sculpture. In the last few years, Albert Oehlen has also been writing and directing full-length feature films, including Painter, Bad Painter (featuring Kim Gordon in an acting role), and Yellow. His work has been exhibited in institutions around the world, including recent solo shows at Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany (2024), Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing, China (2024), Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, Germany (2023), and Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2019).

Kim Gordon (b. 1953) is a musician and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her latest record, The Collective (2024), was met with widespread critical acclaim and received two Grammy nominations. She has been the subject of a recent solo exhibition at 303 Gallery, New York, and is currently in shows at gnration, Braga, Portugal and Efraín López, New York. Gordon is half of Body/Head and was a founding member of the band Sonic Youth.

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

Celeste Rapone @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago - Controlled Burn

Celeste Rapone: Controlled Burn

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

October 16, 2021 - November 13, 2021

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Controlled Burn, an exhibition of twelve new paintings by Celeste Rapone. At CvsD, Rapone has been the focus of an eponymous Big Dig virtual presentation in 2020 and Everlast, a two-person exhibition with Betsy Odom in 2018. Controlled Burn is her first solo show at the gallery.

In a group of brand new canvases, Celeste Rapone opens up the space in her detailed compositions, situating figures in an architectural or natural scene. Still figurative and populated by a range of evocative characters, they are now less claustrophobically compressed, the settings providing a theatrical context for morphological feats, sly mass-cultural references, and luscious paint application. Celeste Rapone started work on the paintings in this exhibition in what she candidly calls "the clusterfuck of January, 2021" with no specific trajectory in mind, but over time they revealed themselves to be more about painting itself than anything thematic or topical. Where she has often approached painting as a chain process, a finished piece suggesting the direction for the next one, in this case each canvas took its own journey and gradually became its unique, monadic self, feeding less off its predecessor than off the intense energy of the time and formal and technical problems gyrating in Celeste Rapone's head. Among the diverse, dazzling results are the largest paintings she's ever made, a trend upward in scale that continues at present, as well as some of the most daring and hilarious images in her opus.

CELESTE RAPONE (b. 1985, New Jersey) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, where she is now an adjunct professor in painting and drawing. Her work has been exhibited at Josh Lilley Gallery (London), Marianne Boesky Gallery (NYC), Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery (Luxembourg), Roberts Projects (LA), Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston), Julius Caesar (Chicago), The Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens), and Monya Rowe Gallery (NYC). In addition to her solo exhibition with Corbett vs. Dempsey, her work will also be included in ICA Boston's exhibition, A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now on view from March 30 - September 5, 2022. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Newcity, The Chicago Tribune, The Georgia Review, and she is a 2018 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com