Rebecca Shore: Being There

Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to present Being There, an exhibition of new paintings by Chicago-based artist Rebecca Shore (b. 1956). This is the artist's sixth solo show at the gallery.

In her latest body of work, Rebecca Shore meditates on a shifting set of spaces – interiors and exteriors, mostly domestic sites including bedrooms, porches, gardens, verandas, mezzanines, dining rooms, courtyards, doorways, and windows. Indeed, the status of the portal in these paintings, executed in acrylic on linen or in gouache on paper, is a central point. The viewer is consistently invited to view something through something else, their vision moving between different atmospheres, varieties of light, qualities of enclosure or landscape. Building on her relatively recent pivot from abstraction to representation, Shore has retained her immaculate technical approach, a feature of her work across her oeuvre, back to the paintings she was making in the early 1980s and the quilts she made alongside her friend Christina Ramberg later in the decade. There are no figures in these new works, only spaces. Often containing sly visual games or lurking spatial paradoxes, Shore's paintings create an imagined territory into which the viewer can project themself, a stage set carefully prepared for cognitive immersion. Two beds with paintings hung above them, one a daytime scene, one a night sky, the pairing creating a subtle tension in the room. Layers of oblique intertexts hovering in the paintings – Giovanni di Paolo's window-glimpsed landscapes and stylized rock formations, the vibrating curved lines of Karl Wirsum "awning" canvases. There are multiple patterns associated with different elements of these scenarios – a wall, a floor, stairs, a woven curtain, an iron gate, a hanging mobile – each combination culminating in a complex rhythmic assemblage, an extraordinary visual polyrhythm.

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Image: Rebecca Shore, Untitled (24-09), 2024, acrylic on linen, 26 x 28 inches.