George Deem: Quotations

The Allan Stone Gallery is proud to present George Deem: Quotations, an exhibition of the early work of Deem, whose career spanned more than forty years and engaged many of the most challenging questions in contemporary art practice. Showing concurrently with George Deem: We Were There at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, this exhibition provides a retrospective of this artist's substantial legacy. The exhibition, comprised of more than fifteen paintings and works on paper, will run from January 8th through February 21st, 2009.

George Deem's work provides a rare link between the calligraphic expressionism of Cy Twombly to the postmodern appropriations of Sherri Levine, threading through the pop art strategies of Warhol and Larry Rivers. And yet, as is the case with all artists of vision, none of these relationships are sufficient to explain or diminish Deem's singular creative voice. His 'handwriting' does not aspire to Twombly's heroically-scaled expressiveness; It is not splayed across the canvas, but rather organized into tight, symmetrical registers (Paragraph, early 1960s). His drawing is camouflaged to appear, to the casual eye, as writing; the pleasures of its deft touch are only available to close inspection.

In many ways, Deem's paintings are similarly camouflaged. The 'quotations' of Courbet, Vermeer, and other old masters that appear in his work are not collage, as they might seem at first glance, but painted by Deem himself. He has been called an 'appropriation' artist, but in fact he does not truly appropriate anything. If he chooses to include Courbet's 'Painter's Studio' in a painting, he doesn't paste it in or use a dye transfer; He reconstructs the painting from the ground up. One may recognize the composition and color scheme as Courbet's, but in fact the actual painting belongs wholly to Deem. Unencumbered by concerns of subject and authorship, Deem frees himself to concentrate completely on the formal pleasures of applying pigment to canvas. In short, he is free to play.

This playfulness is often apparent in his treatment of his subjects, as when he arranges rendezvous between figures in two different Vermeer paintings, or when he reproduces George Washington's portrait repeatedly within the same picture, rotating it each time (Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1964.) But these strategies never devolve into simple parody; When Deem playfully 'quotes' the work of other painters, he not only draws attention to the formal qualities of his copy, but also invites the viewer to reevaluate the original. When Deem rotates Washington's head, he is engaging the past, and refusing to allow our assumptions about our icons to remain fixed and uncritical. He reminds us that the image of Washington crossing the Delaware is merely an image, and as such it is open to manipulation, interpretation, and even corruption. In this way, Deem actually revitalizes his subjects by bringing them back into flux, into question, into play. His paintings insist that the past is never something to be merely 'taken as given.' As Charles Molesworth has written:

The persistence of someone's masterly vision; the uncanny way that uncanny things occur in time; the multiple frames of cognition involved in representation; the higher truth of an invested memory; all these and more await the patient viewer of a Deem.

Writing of his artistic process, George Deem once described "a time when everything that had been taken as given breaks up." Deem's paintings seem always to revisit this de-stabilizing moment-- in the way they persistently co-opt familiar images and uproot them from their comfortable stations in history, the way they manipulate the work of old masters and recombine the elements of classic paintings to compose new, unfamiliar, and humorous situations. Even in his early calligraphic works, the monumentality of the compositions is leavened by a prankster's nimble wit. The slabs of hand-painted 'text' that constitute these paintings, which appear so dense and solemn that one could confuse them for Commandments from across the room, dissolve into playful, illegible scribbles once one views them up close. Every time one is confronted with a work by George Deem, they are compelled to ask themselves: "Is this history, or does it occur in the present? Is this experience, or merely its residue? Is this an image of the thing, or the thing itself?"

Quotations marks the first exhibition of Deem's work at the Allan Stone Gallery since 1977, tracing a relationship that began in 1963 with Deem's first New York solo exhibition.

George Deem: Quotations