Dominick Di Meo, an artist who shook up Chicago’s artwork scene within the Sixties with surreal work and collages, solely to achieve a following far past town late in his profession, has died at 97. His demise was introduced on Sunday by his Chicago gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey.
Di Meo was among the many Chicagoan artists who throughout the ’60s plotted a brand new, off-kilter course of art-making that shared little in widespread with the Pop artwork and Minimalism rising from New York. Neither completely summary nor completely figural, his works from this period had been a part of an effort to inject new power into Chicago, whose inventive scene he mentioned was “useless creatively.”
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He was a member of the Monster Roster, a gaggle of artists who labored in figuration at a time when abstraction nonetheless dominated. Lots of them seemed to historic mythologies to obliquely touch upon the world’s present situation. By this unfastened group, he grew to become shut with artists reminiscent of Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, and June Leaf.
Born in 1927 in Niagara Falls, New York, to Italian immigrant dad and mom, Di Meo battled polio at a younger age, leaving him with a long-lasting curiosity in demise and the physique. In an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, he credited his flip to artwork with an expertise had in a polio ward. Wrapped up in a plaster forged and unable to maneuver, Di Meo acquired free toys, solely to see them taken away from him by a nurse. Annoyed by that have, he developed a want to make use of his fingers to create.
He got here to Chicago to check on the College of the Artwork Institute, receiving an undergraduate diploma in 1952. When he first matriculated, he wished to develop into a panorama painter, however he emerged working in a extra experimental mode.
Di Meo seemed to Twentieth-century avant-gardes like Dada and Surrealism, a lot as New York artists did, drawing ready-made objects into his work and growing personal symbologies. He seemed, too, to painters like Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet, who intentionally left their surfaces tough and unappealing to the attention.
However Di Meo took equal inspiration from Aztec, African, and Mayan artwork on view at Chicago’s Discipline Museum. “We had been all turned on by it, it was a giant studying expertise,” he informed Obrist.
Lots of Di Meo’s works from the ’60s are off-kilter and hard to parse. Satie by Moonlight (1966), a portray owned by the Artwork Institute of Chicago, contains a painted determine with a moon-shaped head; it wears an precise, used T-shirt. Somnabulator (1964), one of many works Di Meo painted following a quick interval in his dad and mom’ homeland of Italy, portrays a sleepwalker whose physique splits aside, forming a number of heads with gaping mouths.
Di Meo relocated to New York in 1969, taking on residence in SoHo 5 years later. In 2007, effectively after SoHo had been gentrified, Di Meo informed the New York Occasions that he had by no means a lot wished to maneuver there, on condition that so many artists had been there already. But he stayed for a lot of his profession.
In SoHo, Di Meo encountered scraps of cloth, mesh fabric, and different items of trash, which he harvested and became oddball sculptural works. He informed the Occasions that the neighborhood supplied “a gold mine for an assemblage artist who simply wished to place issues collectively.”
Regardless of having featured in group exhibits early on on the Artwork Institute of Chicago and what was then the Albright-Knox Artwork Gallery, and regardless of having acquired a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972, Di Meo didn’t mount many solo exhibits after the ’70s. His CV incorporates a 26-year hole between 1982 and 2008, the yr that Corbett vs. Dempsey mounted his first solo present.
After that, Di Meo started to obtain larger recognition. He had a solo present with London’s blue-chip Thomas Dane Gallery in 2013 and one other one-person present on the trendsetting JTT gallery in New York in 2017. Artists many generations his youthful started taking a look at his work, too. Earlier this yr, New York’s Simone Subal Gallery paired works by Di Meo from the ’90s with new work by Ella Rose Flood, a Chicago-based artist in her 20s.
But Di Meo at all times appeared to enjoy his outsider standing, so fame didn’t a lot curiosity him. Talking of SoHo’s inventive exodus, he informed the Occasions in 2007, “It’s nicer now that a lot of the artists have left. Artists are prima donnas, you understand.”