In the North Gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to present Recent Paintings, an exhibition of new work by Richard Wetzel. This is the gallery’s fourth solo show with the artist.

For more than six decades, Richard Wetzel’s work has addressed the fundamental issue raised by collage: hybridity. From collages he first made in the early 1960s, using an exacto to abstract extant etchings, through back-printed plexiglass works he showed later that decade as a member of the Nonplussed Some, Wetzel’s formative work has investigated methods and results of conjoining unlike things. In the unsettling speculative paintings of the eighties, for instance, voluptuous plants bloomed into vicious insects. More recently, Wetzel has fashioned preternatural objects – logs with claws or jaws, for example – that upend expectations about what goes with what.

In his latest work, Wetzel’s fascination with grafting has manifested in a set of painstakingly patinated sculptures, all grounded in plant or tree forms but terminating in unexpected ways, with creature extremities. Wood is hybridized with bone and antler in invisible segues, cross-fades worthy of a skilled disc jockey. Morbidly skin-like tones and searching or protruding forms dominate as these artworks extend from and disappear back into the wall or sprout from the floor. Among them are several “god sticks,” freestanding works referencing traditional Maori staffs through which divinities enter ritual activities. Another set of related wall-hanging pieces graft together ram’s horn fragments with walrus bacula, the combination of which is even more outrageous than the elements would suggest.

While these works extend some of the sculptural practice that has been Wetzel’s focus since the nineties, the other new body of work in Recent Paintings consists of variously sized spheres. These objects, which hang tangent to the wall, as if floating, are pigmented with iron dust and then treated with acids, causing them to corrode in variegated patterns, each one as distinct as a fingerprint. Here, as in the monochromatic patination of the flora, the surface bears many painterly decisions and happy accidents, making them something like color-field sculptures. That these apparently heavy, dense objects hover weightlessly in space is only part of their magic; the rest lies in the way they participate in the ongoing tradition of paintings-as-objects and objects-as-paintings. For the spheres, the question of hybridity is internalized – rather than asking how one visible part of the work is transformed into another, they beg the question of their own material makeup, an existential quandary, as in: what constitutes that uncanny, ominous-looking thing?

Pictured: Richard Wetzel, Infiltrator, 2025, oil on mixed materials, 50 x 18 x 13 inches.

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Tags: Corbett vs. Dempsey, Recent Paintings, Richard Wetzel, West Town