FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

GEORGE DEEM New Work November 18 – December 18, 2004

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY invites you to an exhibition of new paintings by GEORGE DEEM. Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, November 18 from 6-8pm, or during the run of the exhibition, which continues through December 18. The gallery is located at:

533 West 23rd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues). Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am-6pm

The current exhibition marks the publication of GEORGE DEEM: How to Paint A Vermeer by Thames & Hudson in October of this year. For forty years, GEORGE DEEM has explored issues of representation through carefully composed visual montages of art historical subjects. In contrast to many contemporary artists who are engaged with “art about art,” George Deem's meditations on the work of Old and Modern Masters occur squarely within the arena of painting. His is not the revitalization of meaning obscured by mechanical reproduction, but rather the construction of meaning through the act of painting. Of the many painters to find their way into George Deem's work, Caravaggio, Mantegna, Matisse and Picasso among them, it is the enigmatic Vermeer who emerges as a central figure. Since the 1960s Deem has returned repeatedly to the paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch master. The exhibition features thirteen new and recent paintings and works on paper that explore further the artist's long-standing engagement with Vermeer.

In his introductory essay to How to Paint a Vermeer , curator and art historian Robert Rosenblum writes,

“For Deem, Vermeer's domestic spaces can be magically transformed into an imagined reality, the equivalent of a stage set in which furniture can be moved about and a changing cast of characters can enact their quiet dramas or even disappear entirely, leaving behind only a virginal, a chair, or a table. And if they are fluid in their interior spaces, furnishings, and occupants, they are also fluid in time and geography… The enchantment of old-master realist painting – to make us feel that, miraculously, the canvas permits us to peer into a seamless fusion of our own reality with that invented by the painter – has rarely been embraced so fully. We feel that Deem, whether awake or asleep, lives in Vermeer's spaces, sitting on his chairs, listening to his music, looking out of his glazed windows, basking in his suffused light….

…It goes without saying that Deem's immaculately crafted retrospections, with their mixture of personal history and art history, are a singular achievement; yet enduring artists don't work in a vacuum but reflect those aspects of the changing world they live in that will also be mirrored in the art of their contemporaries. Deem is no exception. His private vision, in fact, coincides again and again with what older and younger generations of artists, not to mention architects, were thinking and making during the last four decades, when contemporary art began to look backwards as much as forwards and when the nineteenth century's passion for historical revival, once scorned by modernists, was itself revived.”

GEORGE DEEM's work has been exhibited at the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Evansville Museum of Arts and Science, Indiana; Flint Institute of Arts , Michigan ; Fort Wayne Museum of Art , Indiana ; Indianapolis

Museum of Art, Indiana; Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York; University of Oregon Museum of Art, Eugene; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; South Bend Regional Museum of Art, Indiana; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Wichita Center for the Arts, Kansas; Witte Museum, San Antonio, Texas; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; among others.

George Deem's work is in numerous public and corporate collections including the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; Rockford Art Museum, Illinois; JP Morgan Chase Bank Art Collection, New York; Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton, New York; Evansville Museum of Arts and Science, Indiana; Bank of America Art Collection, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Ludwig Collection, Aachen, Germany; Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio; Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton and Garrison, New York; Museum Ludwig Donation, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York.

For additional information and images please contact Julie Brunner Cross at (212) 675 7490 or julie@pavelzoubok.com