Richard Wetzel: Some Must Watch Paintings 1983-85

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 21, 6-8 PM

With great excitement, Corbett vs. Dempsey introduces Richard Wetzel, Some Must Watch: Paintings 1983-85. This is the artist’s third solo presentation with the gallery. 

Richard Wetzel made the transition from collage and printmaking to painting over a period in the late 1970s. Working from painstakingly organized schematic color charts, with associated works on paper executed in Prismacolor pencil, he gradually moved up in scale and shifted away from the specificity of images found in his collages toward invented imagery, eventually landing on a series of incredibly original biomorphic creations – monstrous forms in eerie, opalescent hues with gradated backgrounds. An intrepid craftsman in any medium, from the early works back-printed on plexiglass to his current sculptural works mixing wood, bone, antler, and other materials, Wetzel’s paintings are marvels of fetishistic surface and luminous gleam. The subject matter of these canvases has a phantasmagoric orientation – mutant hybrids of insect and vegetable are shown in close-up detail, depicting creatures that are beautiful, gruesome, and often ominously sexual. Not seen since they were made, the nine thermonuclear works in Some Must Watch constitute a sort of post-apocalyptic suite, perhaps more relevant today than when they were first executed. 

Since emerging in the late 1960s as a member of the Nonplussed Some, one of the original Imagist exhibition groups, Wetzel has been living and working in Chicago. He has shown with Zaks Gallery, where these paintings debuted four decades ago, and OK Harris Gallery in New York. Wetzel's own Sedgwick Street Gallery, opened in 1962 when he was nineteen years old, gave Ed Paschke and Karl Wirsum their first solo exhibitions.

Image: Richard Wetzel, Keeper of the Children, 1985, oil on linen, 44 x 60.