Joe Zucker's work has always moved between material and concept, between image and process, whether in his well-known cotton ball paintings, his figurative paintings of pirate ships, or his recent works using gypsum and watercolor.  The Grid Paintings exhibits Zucker's first mature body of work in Zucker's oeuvre; the grid-based paintings he made from 1963 to 1968, when the New York artist was based in the Midwest, first in his birthplace of Chicago, then in Minneapolis.  

The earliest of these is a spectacular tour-de-force, Joe's Painting #4 (1963-64), which combines a thickly worked surface and an optical illusion that seems to put a light source in the interstices of the grid.  Some of the pieces in the exhibition are actually woven from strips of fabric, while others are painted to look that way; some have a special architecture built into the stretcher, so the front of the canvas slopes forward in the middle, like the wing of an airplane, while others are part of an elaborate 12-panel series that progressively zooms in on the center of the first piece.  

Zucker has said that his initial inspiration for these rarely seen works, which have not been exhibited since the 1960s, was the weave of Walgreens' lawn furniture, but they also engage and challenge the modernist formal impulse, breaking down painting to its most basic component, the weave of the canvas, which is itself a weave.  In addition to seven of these original grid paintings, the exhibition will also include one of Zucker's brand new gypsum works, and several drawings that the artist made at the time, hilariously documenting his own physical relationship with these large canvases.  This exhibition puts in context the early work of one of the great mavericks of American art, and at the same time it brings back home one of Chicago's own.

Joe Zucker: The Grid Paintings

ZUCKER, Joe and Terry R. Myers

Corbett vs. Dempsey

In her first exhibition with Corbett vs Dempsey, Zuckerman-Hartung continues a deeply inquisitive exploration of painting as a primary practice, investigating its material raptures, intellectual speed-bumps, and conceptual limits.  Zuckerman-Hartung, who was raised in Olympia, Washington, and now lives and teaches in Chicago, simultaneously has an adoring relationship with paint - its gooey, viscous, repulsive, sexy physicality - and is also instinctively skeptical of its fetishistic power.  Working abstractly, in relatively small scale, she reaches into a deep trick-bag, pouring, spraying, incising, collaging, assemblaging, linking, amputating, and otherwise thoroughly working and reworking her canvases.  An earlier interest in modernist geometry has been subsumed in a much wider array of effects, blasting open cubist facets and placing them in an explosive array of textures, colors, and even images.  

Ferociously original and intent on maintaining a permanent personal revolution, Zuckerman-Hartung has rapidly become one of the most visible artists of her generation to emerge in Chicago.  Very recent exhibitions have included Anna Kustera Gallery (New York) and Spazio Cabinet (Milan), and in upcoming months she will be featured in one-person exhibitions at Jacky Strenz (Frankfurt) in March, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) in May.  

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung: Negative Joy

Molly and John Corbett ZUCKERMAN-HARTUNG

Catalog for an exhibition held at Corbett vs. DempseyNovember 30, 2012 - January 26, 2013Organized in collaboration with the University of Illinoisat Chicago College of Architecture, Design, & the ArtsEssays by John Corbett & Judith KirshnerDesign by Sonnenzimmercvsd0061softcover, 62 pages, 9 x 7 inchesISBN: 978-0-9884492-0-6

Richard Koppe: Gyroscopic

KOPPE, Richard, Judith Kirshner and John Corbett

Catalog for an exhibition held at Corbett vs. Dempsey
April 5 - May 11, 2013

Includes an essay by John Corbett

Design by James Goggin

David Hartt: For Everyone a Garden

HARTT, David and John Corbett

In 1913, the year that the Armory Show hit Chicago, an anonymous Chicago artist gathered every newspaper clipping from the infamous Art Institute exhibition into an extraordinary handmade document. Freak Art Scrapbook presents this folk ledger documenting the key presentation of early twentieth-century American and European modernist art, a collection of witty and vitriolic snippets from the popular press, much of it dripping with satire as an entire city took to lampooning modern art. Lovingly reproduced in all its bilious, acidic yellow, sporting pre-jazz cartoons that snicker at Marcel Duchamp's iconic "Nude Descending a Staircase," the scrapbook is a complex, multilayered artifact, not only a register of the Midwestern response to modernism, but also a fascinating glimpse of the central arguments about populism and the vanguard of art.

Freak Art Scrapbook: Chicago's Armory Show in Print, 1913

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Catalog for an exhibition held at Corbett vs. Dempsey7 February - 15 March, 2014Design by Sonnenzimmercvsd0075softcover, foil-stamped, 80 pages, 10 x 8 inches

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung: Violet Fogs Azure Snot

ZUCKERMAN-HARTUNG, Molly

Catalog for an exhibition held at Corbett vs. DempseyOctober 24 - December 6, 2014Includes an essay by John Corbett and a bonus flexi-disc featuring recordings of John Cage and Sun Ra accompanies the catalog.Design by Sonnenzimmercvsd0084softcover, 48 pages, 10 x 8 inchesISBN: 978-0-9904696-2-9The phrase "Dusty Groove" is a registered trademark, and property of Dusty Holdings, LLC. The exhibition title Josiah McElheny: Dusty Groove is used with express permission of the trademark holders and is not affiliated with the business Dusty Groove.

Josiah McElheny: Dusty Groove

McELHENY, Josiah, John Corbett, John Cage and Sun Ra

Ray Yoshida (1930–2009) taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 40 years, where, with his students―among them, Jim Nutt, Philip Hanson and Christina Ramberg―he fostered a scene of artists that would become known as the Chicago Imagists. Touch and Go is the first book to comprehensively examine Yoshida's work in relation to his life in an educational institution, both as a student and a teacher. The Chicago arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s is explored here as a community of mutual influence, with Yoshida as a figure of particular importance. As John Corbett writes in his essay: "He was influential. He was influenced. He was part of the nuanced series of relays that has produced the unique art scene in Chicago, open to input from elsewhere, but in many ways a world quite hermetic and almost perversely eccentric."

Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence (CORBETT VS. DEM)

Corbett, John

Since the 1980s, New York-born Terry Winters (born 1949) has been one of the foremost American painters, enjoying equal renown for both his prints and drawings. Published to accompany his show at Corbett vs. Dempsey, "The Pencil of Nature" covers drawings Winters created between 2006 and 2014, ranging from small-scale, heavily worked graphite drawings to large ones incorporating charcoal, ink and gouache. One suite titled " Difference Surface" involves 20 related panels, each one juxtaposing pattern against pattern, creating augmentations and interferences where broken symmetries are pushed into a new, wondrous realm. With their shimmering black surfaces, cellular forms and stretched nets, these drawings reach deep into the act of mark-making. This volume features all works included in the exhibition and a selection of collages, as well as fragments from an ongoing dialogue between Winters, Corbett and Dempsey on drawing and improvisation.

Terry Winters: The Pencil of Nature

Individual Artists

Bathhouse, Meatpacking District and the Dream Cards presents a selection of drawings from the 1970s by Jimmy Wright (born 1944). Made just as Wright hit New York City, these works chart his engagement with the subculture of gay bathhouses and clubs, and the more colorful side of street life on the Lower East Side. An insightful observer of human behavior deeply engaged with the action himself, Wright was the fascinated documentarian of a fleeting scene. By the 1980s he had turned this attention inward, to his own dream life, which he religiously charted in sketches and annotations on what he called “dream cards.” Bathhouse, Meatpacking District and the Dream Cards brings these three bodies of drawings together with an interview of the artist conducted by Jim Dempsey and an essay by John Corbett.

Jimmy Wright: Bathhouse, Meatpacking District and the Dream Cards: New York Underground 1973–1990

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Books by Corbett vs. Dempsey