Gina Litherland: Gone to Earth
@ Corbett vs. Dempsey
2156 W Fulton St, Chicago, IL 60612
Opening Thursday, November 12th, from 6PM - 8PM
On view through Saturday, January 9th
Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present Gone to Earth, an exhibition of new paintings by Gina Litherland. This is the artist’s sixth solo show at CvsD.
Based in the countryside outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Gina Litherland (b. 1955) has spent the last four decades quietly creating an imaginative universe uniquely her own. Though her intricate and subtle paintings have connections to historical movements like Surrealism and Magic Realism, they deal with a symbolic and referential lexicon culled from decades of personal research and meditation, a wellspring of images that are both idiosyncratically singular and virtually universal.
In these sixteen works, all painted since 2022, Litherland has deepened her investigation of the natural world, populating landscapes and forests and waterways and buildings with creatures and their reverent, attendant humans. The continuum between people, places, and animals is always in play, whether in a woman resting her head on a wooden table, her red hair flowing alongside a gorgeous feline in “Not Really a Still Life” (2025), or the lupine couture worn by the lady in “Wolf Wear” (2025), set against a backdrop of cracking wallpaper foliage that penetrates into three dimensions. The figures are all women. Two of them levitate, as does a fish. A lemur watches. One woman is hybridized into a cormorant. Crows and raccoons and wolves and dogs and cats abound. There’s a bear. And a couple of woodchucks.
As part of her technical repertoire, Litherland sometimes uses decalcomania, a blotting method often associated with Max Ernst, in which secondary surfaces are used to apply sections of paint, then removed, leaving a mottled area of organic textures, into which she then works, sometimes drawing out other images that suggest themselves. In a rich symbiosis between the paint medium and the subject, these blotted backgrounds, garments, and settings bleed into the mysterious narratives, adding drama and heightening intrigue. All the paintings are executed on board, most in oil, five recent ones in egg tempera, which lends another luster to Litherland’s luminous surfaces.
Pictured: Gina Litherland, Levitation, 2022, oil on panel, 16 x 24 inches; 17 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches, framed. Photo: Travis Roozée
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Tags: Corbett vs. Dempsey, Gina Litherland, Gone to Earth, West Town
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