Corbett vs. Dempsey

About the Gallery
Corbett vs. Dempsey LLC was founded by Jim Dempsey and John Corbett and opened its previous space on North Ashland Avenue in September 2004. Since opening, Corbett vs. Dempsey has presented a range of international artists and artists connected with the historical and contemporary legacy of Chicago. The gallery's mission has included extensive exploration of widely known artists including Ellen Berkenblit, Brian Calvin, Arturo Herrera, Charline von Heyl, Dick Higgins, Rebecca Morris, Albert Oehlen, Joyce Pensato, Arlene Shechet, and Christopher Wool, supporting emerging and mid-career figures including Christina Forrer, Gabrielle Garland, Magalie Guérin, David Hartt, Celeste Rapone, Rebecca Shore, Lui Shtini, Cauleen Smith, John Sparagana, Omar Velázquez, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, and championing artists of critical significance to post-war Chicago including Margot Bergman, Dominick Di Meo, Edward Flood, Philip Hanson, Thomas H. Kapsalis, Robert Lostutter, Christina Ramberg, Diane Simpson, Karl Wirsum, and Jimmy Wright. Creative music has always been a feature of the gallery's activities; in addition to having its own record label, CvsD is proud to represent Peter Brötzmann and the estate of Sun Ra.

About the presentation
Corbett vs. Dempsey will feature Robert Lostutter, Rebecca Shore, and Richard Wetzel, three Chicago-based artists whose work reflects their close attention to technical refinement and fierce pursuit of unseen images. Lostutter’s drawings from his recent Kyōsei series imagine hybrid plant-bird-human figures in immaculate graphite portraits. Shore’s 1980s gouache abstractions, made in the early years of her career, are at once diagrammatic and sumptuously tactile. And Wetzel’s opalescent hanging sculptures from the 1990s present a perverse trophy wall of bulbous extrusions, relating back to his early Imagist collages, paintings, and back-painted plexiglass works.