Brian Calvin: Something or Other

For the final show of 2022, Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to present Brian Calvin, Something or Other, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings. This is Calvin’s fourth solo exhibition with CvsD.

Brian Calvin’s assiduous relationship to the figure borders on the obsessive—since the 1990s, he has explored approaches to faciality from every angle, asking for a full list of the face’s constituent parts, investigating how they may be combined and situated, what happens when there are too many or too few, what productive confusion occurs when faces are combined or seem to be combined. In a group of new canvases and works on paper, Calvin has allowed the images to move in unexpected directions, accessing Cubism through the back door of Surrealism, expressing the otherworldly by way of the everyday, the multiple point perspective by means of a singular point of view. Along the way, the California painter has invented several signal icons—spectral irises, red-hot lips, and hyper-stylized, ventilated noses, for instance—which function both as features on special people and as rationales for extraordinary painting. His command of bright color is an important factor in this body of work, as is the play of flatness and implied deep space—giant Moai-like heads that fill the whole frame and small heads that peer from a distance. Something or Other introduces eight large canvases, four small canvases, and a selection of drawings in graphite or pastel. All sumptuously executed, all deliciously weird. 

Image: Brian Calvin, Blue Sky, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 56 inches. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman