Seven Images by Denise Corley

Denise Corley grew up in Southern California. Her university education was at first wildly experimental, then equally formal. This gives her work irreverence and openness, coupled with structure and knowing. 

I discovered her work through the project she runs with Tom Fitzgibbon, Icebox4 (Space for Artists) in their sprawling South Williamsburg loft and venues around the city. (Kylie Heidenheimer also told me about her as she has known her for years). The Icebox shows are eclectic and attentively curated, making me curious to know about Denise and Tom's work. There is such an immediate affinity for me to how Denise is working with texture and surface. 

I'm sharing works that particularly caught my eye on a studio visit. They convey her interest in surface, which she elaborates on in her 1997 CAA lecture Bridging the Gap Between Abstract and Representational:

"But also, you have to really encounter painting; it is the total experience- physically, sensually and intellectually.   Making a painting dimensional enhances the experience of really having “seen it.”"

Corley has worked with the flower and lattice motif for some time, pushing aesthetic, ecological, and gendered concerns dimensionally. Her work has overtones of Ree Morton; the liberation in both their work is palpable. Corley observes, "I have always wondered about feminine aesthetics, a generalization for sure but a tendency toward the tactile, the curved, and the real."

Later, Corley "started drawing upon ideas about water and I began scuba diving.  I mention scuba diving because for me it was an experience of actually seeing the birthplace of life- primordial life forms, shapes and colors, " comparing it to "being in the inside of our body."

This eael-size painting adds ropy paint skins to the surface.

A nosegay of urban detritus.

From a catalog, Twilight Effect, 2020, on press molded paper with wire: 23 x 27 x 8 inches.

"In 1987 I began working with corrugated plastic. Instead of the whole image shifting- now only aspects of it did.   For me, shapes have meaning. I compounded shapes and images." Yet the paint brings human touch to the industrial materials. 

American Gothic, not Grant Wood's America, 2024, roughly 78 x 34 inches, seen at Extreme Whether curated by Tom Fitzgibbon at 128 Rivington Street, September-October 2025.  

I am inspired by how Corley brings found material to life, her feminist ambivalence about elegance, her humor, and the freedom of her instinct.