CHICAGO—Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to open the fall season with Party Cut, an exhibition of work by Rebecca Morris.
Based in her hometown of Los Angeles, Morris is an abstract painter of uncommon inventive powers. Her large canvases incorporate drawn elements—linear gesture, pattern, intimations of depth—but in a distinctly painterly manner, with great sensitivity to facture and tonality. Indeed, drawing has always been a significant part of Morris’s process; she periodically takes time out to execute a body of drawings, and these highly coloristic works refresh and inspire her painting. In her first exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Morris presents several stunning new paintings, contrasted with a survey of drawings dating back to the period in the mid 1990s, when she had just graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dazzling and often quite humorous, Morris’s drawings show her special manner of using formal means to prod and pry at other kinds of meaning, be they connotative, emotional, or literal. Blocks of color, splatter, loose grids of varying line weight, washes and deft use of resist, occasional words and dates spelled in sweeping strokes – these are works that span available techniques and materials for potency and deliver the goods. The paintings are utterly delicious, compiling fragments into a constellation or luring with the possibility of resolution, then holding out, like a dissonant last chord.

Rebecca Morris’s recent exhibitions include Southafternoon, at Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany (traveling to Bonnefanten Museum, Maastrict, Holland in 2014) and an upcoming solo show at LAXART in L.A. In 2005, she was the subject of a major solo show at the Renaissance Society; this is her first exhibition in Chicago since then.
In the East Wing, Corbett vs. Dempsey presents a selection of works by Robert Nickle (1919-1980). One of the preeminent collage artists in Chicago, Nickle’s sumptuous abstractions were constructed of weathered bits of paper and cardboard he found on the street. Each of the small pieces took years to make, the artists waiting for precisely the correct element to add to a specific spot. Associated with the New Bauhaus for years, Nickle’s work has its affinities with Kurt Schwitters and Alberto Burri, but his sensibility is wholly personal, as is reflected in his elaborate and unusual manner of framing. The works all have a little window on the verso with a photo of the artist on the day he finished the collage, a literal portal onto the visage of the maker.

Robert Nickle’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, David and Alfred Smart Museum, Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Carnegie Institute, and the National Museum in D.C

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Tags: Bucktown, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Rebecca Morris, Robert Nickle, Wicker Park