Feb 19th 2010

Peter Brötzmann: Wood & Water

@ Corbett vs. Dempsey

1120 N Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL 60622

Opening Friday, February 19th, from 5PM - 9PM

On view through Saturday, March 27th

Peter Brötzmann is perhaps best known as a musician, but has been consistently making and occasionally exhibiting visual art in Europe and America since 1959. In 2007, CvsD mounted the first major survey of Brötzmann’s artwork in the United States, a show that focused heavily on his large paintings and constructions. Now, two years later, Wood & Water features his recent small-scale work on paper, including woodcut prints and watercolors.

Despite their difference in scale and media, these works maintain the elegant roughness that characterizes both Brötzmann’s music and his larger artwork. Some of the subject matter is the same. For example, his interest in industrial and natural landscapes remains; the belching smokestacks and hump-backed steel bridges that surround Brötzmann’s hometown of Wuppertal, Germany, are gouged out in one of his stark black and white woodcuts. Meanwhile, in his watercolors, Mother Nature’s lumpy hills, heavy clouds, and skeletal trees are painted in gorgeous washes of black, purple, and gray. Brötzmann’s material inventiveness is also on display here. Some of the pieces in the show make use of the textural and chromatic qualities of wrinkled foil wrappers, round paper pie plates, and instant coffee. These prints and paintings require only the simplest ingredients (wood, water, pigment, paper), but Brötzmann’s skill lies in using them to create extraordinary formal complexity and raw emotional power.

Harold Haydon in the East Wing. In 1936, age 27, Chicago artist Harold Haydon set out to make an illuminated version of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1866 classic Crime & Punishment. His notion was to create ink drawings for the novel that would overlay the text on each page, illustrating the action, for instance, as Raskolnikov kills Alena or as he confesses to Sonya. The process began with rough sketches for a total of 10 sample pages. These were refined over several generations, then the final version was transferred to a typeset page, sitting right over the scene that to which the image referred.

For some reason, Haydon’s illustrated Crime & Punishment was never brought to fruition. We are left with this very suggestive selection of ten finished proof pages, presented with some of the artist’s initial sketches and a page of font calligraphy, displayed at Corbett vs. Dempsey and published in a 32-page catalog for the first time.

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