Arch Connelly The Future Reflected, Wallworks 1981-1991

Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present Arch Connelly: The Future Reflected, Wallworks 1981–1991. This is the first solo exhibition of Connelly's work in Chicago and his first gallery show since his death.

Born in Chicago, Arch Connelly (1950-1993) attended graduate school at Southern Illinois University (SIU), in Carbondale, Illinois, where he majored in ceramics. In the mid 1970s, Connelly lived in San Francisco, where he was associated with the gay performance troupe Angels of Light, together with fellow artist Martin Wong, and designed sets for the Cockettes. Settling in New York in 1980, Connelly quickly became an important new figure on the East Village art scene, starting with a solo exhibition at Artists Space and continuing with four solo shows at the legendary Fun Gallery, among other venues including White Columns, Holly Solomon Gallery, and Castelli Graphics. Connelly charted a very personal terrain in his work, using faux pearls, silk, sequins, glitter, and shattered eggshells to create what Rene Ricard called "space age surrealism," a sort of alchemical admixture of materials and images, embracing kitschy opulence by raising it to a new altitude and forcing it into a complex new identity. "Connelly pushes this decadence just one step further," wrote artist Jeff Perrone. "Where formal rigor turns dark, into an area where the bubbly takes an ominous tinge, into the arena of fin-du-siecle stage setting, blatantly theatrical, paintings like heavy velvet curtains ready to part, waiting for action to begin." Decades ahead of his time, exploring an explicitly queer aesthetic in a manner that could easily be mistaken for something brand new, Connelly made oval and circular smiley-face canvases as well as gay porn collages, all constructed out of fabulously shimmering and cheaply obtained materials. With a career on the rise, one of Connelly's porn collages graced the cover of the November 1991 issue of Artforum. Tragically, he died of AIDS less than two years later, at age 43. Although he has been seen in recent group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as being the subject of an in-depth survey at SIU last year, this is the first solo exhibition of Arch Connelly's work in the city of his birth and the first commercial gallery presentation to showcase his artwork since his untimely passing, spotlighting rare collages and major works on canvas, focused specifically on his wall-hanging compositions.