GEORGE DEEM | COURBET WITH DETAIL

Deem is known for referencing the history of painting by re-imagining Old Master works in a contemporary context. Deem looked to artists such as Velásquez, Raeburn, Chardin, Caravaggio, and Vermeer, and reconfigured their iconic images through visual devices such as repetition, erasure, text, or elements of 20th-century life and art, in a technique historian Charles Molesworth called “temporal collage” (Charles Molesworth, How To Live In An Image World: The Strategies of Memory, Saratoga Springs 2003). Deem engages the past and refuses to allow our assumptions about our icons to remain fixed and uncritical. He reminds us that these images are merely images, and as such are open to manipulation, interpretation, and even corruption. Since the 1960s Deem's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at such institutions as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, Houston, the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, the Denver Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among many others. From 1962 to 2009 Deem had ten solo exhibitions at the Allan Stone Gallery. His work is in public collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, and others. Deem wrote three books, How to Paint A Vermeer: A Painter's History of Art (2004), ArtSchool (1993) and Let George Do It (2009).