John Sparagana: Between the Eyes
@ Corbett vs. Dempsey
1120 N Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL 60622
Opening Friday, March 18th, from 5PM - 8PM
On view through Saturday, April 30th
In his first one-man show at Corbett vs. Dempsey, John Sparagana presents a startling new body of work as hard-hitting as it is subtle, rich, and elegant. Between the Eyes extends Sparagana’s longstanding practice of intervening in media images. The eight new pieces presented are large-scale—the size of hefty paintings—and all use a complex system of cutting, interdigitating, and interrupting magazine page images, opening up a profoundly revealing, deeply poetic new vision. Each piece grapples with the informational content of a news image, slicing and dicing and further pummeling it; the image is then overlayed with another one drawn from the canon of pop and post-minimal abstraction. Scenes from Haiti and Afghanistan jostle with shapes and forms from Hélio Oiticica, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Andy Warhol. Sparagana is a well-known figure in Chicago and beyond. A book on his work, Sleeping Beauty, with an extensive essay by art historian Mieke Bal, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2008.
In the East Wing, CvsD presents a double debut of two outstanding German artists showing in Chicago for the first time. Tim Berresheim subverts traditional media—painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture—creating Duchampian painting-objects that confound the eye and tease the brain. A whipping, hair-like image cavorts atop a woodgrain background in these one-of-a-kind prints. Matthias Schaufler is a painter and collage-maker based in Berlin. Working with a soft, pastel palette, his highly expressive, figurative paintings are sly and oblique, refracting meaning.
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