Molly Zuckerman-Hartung: Negative Joy

In her first exhibition with Corbett vs Dempsey, Zuckerman-Hartung continues a deeply inquisitive exploration of painting as a primary practice, investigating its material raptures, intellectual speed-bumps, and conceptual limits.  Zuckerman-Hartung, who was raised in Olympia, Washington, and now lives and teaches in Chicago, simultaneously has an adoring relationship with paint - its gooey, viscous, repulsive, sexy physicality - and is also instinctively skeptical of its fetishistic power.  Working abstractly, in relatively small scale, she reaches into a deep trick-bag, pouring, spraying, incising, collaging, assemblaging, linking, amputating, and otherwise thoroughly working and reworking her canvases.  An earlier interest in modernist geometry has been subsumed in a much wider array of effects, blasting open cubist facets and placing them in an explosive array of textures, colors, and even images.   Ferociously original and intent on maintaining a permanent personal revolution, Zuckerman-Hartung has rapidly become one of the most visible artists of her generation to emerge in Chicago.  Very recent exhibitions have included Anna Kustera Gallery (New York) and Spazio Cabinet (Milan), and in upcoming months she will be featured in one-person exhibitions at Jacky Strenz (Frankfurt) in March, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) in May.