Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon | Sun Ra & Others' Covers OPENS FRIDAY!
Schedule
Fri Jan 24 2025 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm
UTC-06:00Location
2156 W. Fulton St., Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60612 | Chicago, IL
Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon, an exhibition of new paintings and multi-media works. This is Oehlen’s fifth show with the gallery and Gordon’s first exhibition in Chicago.In this exhibition, German-born artist Albert Oehlen presents three monumental pieces on shaped aluminum. With enamel paint marks applied directly to the raw substates, which are cut into “omega” shapes similar to those of some newer Oehlen works, these 12-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide metal paintings come equipped with sonic transducers on each of their four adjacent panels. When amplified, the paintings act as de facto speakers and project sound vibrations into the room. Oehlen invited Kim Gordon to make soundtracks for the works. She developed these sound recordings in direct material relationship with the paintings, using the transduced metal plates as amplifiers for her electric guitar. Rather than simply making these sounds for the paintings, she made the sounds on them. Gordon’s bracing improvisations, lasting around 8-minutes each, explore a wide range of colors, from chords, drone, and feedback to electrical noises made with the unplugged guitar cord. The works play intermittently, erupting energetically, then relaxing into silence, their metal forms and the gestural lines inscribed on them supercharged by Gordon’s music. In addition to these three works made collaboratively by the two artists, the exhibition presents a new canvas by Oehlen and a group of small, vibrant paintings by Gordon.
Based between Switzerland, Berlin, Spain, and Los Angeles, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) is one of the most widely-celebrated contemporary artists. His work has adopted and invented numerous approaches to painting and more recently sculpture. In the last few years, Oehlen has also been writing and directing full-length feature films, including Painter, Bad Painter (featuring Kim Gordon in an acting role), and Yellow. His work has been exhibited in institutions around the world, including recent solo shows at Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany (2024), Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing, China (2024), Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, Germany (2023), and Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2019).
Kim Gordon (b. 1953) is a musician and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her latest record, The Collective (2024), was met with widespread critical acclaim and received two Grammy nominations. She has been the subject of a recent solo exhibition at 303 Gallery, New York, and is currently in shows at gnration, Braga, Portugal and Efraín López, New York. Gordon is half of Body/Head and was a founding member of the band Sonic Youth.
IN THE NORTH GALLERY
Nothing Is: Sun Ra and Others' Covers
Starting in the 1960s, extraterrestrial-American musician, composer, and thinker Sun Ra and his band the Arkestra began decorating their own record covers. Partially as an economical way to make small batches of LPs for sale at their concerts, and partly as a continuation of their pioneering DIY activity with their artist-run record label Saturn Records, Ra and his cohorts would gather together, using colored pens, pencils, paints, and collage to design unique jackets for their albums, offering them to the audience from the edge of the stage at the set break or after the show. The rarest of these used fragments of shower curtains from the legendary Sun Ra house in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in their elaborate collaged designs. These covers are of course now prized fetish objects. Many of them were compiled in the book Sun Ra: Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra’s Saturn Label (Fantagraphics, 2022), which situated the handmade covers in context with their more commercially (however still small-batch) produced, offset-printed counterparts.
In Nothing Is, organized by John Corbett and Albert Oehlen for the JUBG in Köln and Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, a wide range of contemporary artists from varying locations and backgrounds is invited to make their own handmade record covers for specific Sun Ra LPs, whether actual or fictional. The show takes its title from a Ra poem (itself reprinted on the ESP LP called Nothing Is):
At first nothing is;
Then nothing transforms itself to be air
Sometimes the air transforms itself to be water;
And the water becomes rain and falls to earth;
Then again, the air through friction becomes fire.
So the nothing and the air and the water
And the fire are really the same---
Upon different degrees.
The artists in Nothing Is are invited to make nothing into something, to imagine a Ra cover that never existed, perhaps invent a whole record that was never produced. In other words, to participate in what Ra called Myth-Science. Ra insisted that Black Americans had special powers of self-invention. They were charged with making their newly crafted myths personal and current, while reaching back into the collective past. The creation of new truths and fresh explanations; the overthrow and subversion of the realm of myth-making; the narrative turn from his-story to history. This is in keeping with Ra’s hands-on methodology, which was self-generative, right down to his name, identity, life-story, music, poetry, stage concept, band-leadership style, lifestyle, philosophy of life, and plan for planet earth. Taking a simple unified starting point – a 12-inch square surface – the exhibition invites the artists to embrace the Nothing Is paradox, asserting that nothingness is itself a form of being and something that never happened might nevertheless exist.
Exhibiting Artists:
Rosa Barba, Ellen Berkenblit, Tim Berresheim, Jens-Uwe Beyer, Andreas Breunig, Mark Booth, André Butzer, Brian Calvin, Luke Calzonetti, Aaron Curry, Lutz Driessen, Hedwig Eberle, Michaela Eichwald, Peter Fengler, Christina Forrer and Caroline Thomas, Kim Gordon, Magalie Guérin, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Philip Hanson, Rachel Harrison, John Harten, Kim Hiorthøy, Andy Hope 1930, Richard Hull, Marcus Jahmal, Cameron Jamie, Sven-Ake Johansson, Jutta Koether, Felix Kubin, Cary Lauren, Jinn Bronwen Lee, Damon Locks, Lasse Marhaug, Chris Martin, Stefan Marx, Paul McCarthy, Josiah McElheny, Roscoe Mitchell, Jason Moran, Rebecca Morris, Stefan Müller, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Adam Pendleton, Richard Prince, Cornelius Quabeck, Celeste Rapone, Daniel Richter, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Matthias Schaufler, Emil Schult, Lui Shtini, Amy Sillman, Cauleen Smith, John Sparagana, Ricky Swallow, Günter Tuzina, Dennis Tyfus, Omar Velázquez, Wolfgang Voigt, Rebecca Warren / FUEL, Christopher Williams, Terry Winters, Toby Ziegler, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.
In the Vault
Rodney Graham
A Little Thought
Created in 2000, A Little Thought is Canadian conceptual polymath Rodney Graham's atypical single-channel piece, a music video for a song written and performed by the artist, featuring bucolic scenes of cherry blossoms and paddling swans intercut with images of a guitar lovingly caressed by a pink fur puff.
