The Immaculate Conception
| Date: | 1971
|
| Medium: | Oil on canvas |
| Size inches: | c. 19 3/4 x 23 1/2 |
| Size cm: | 50 x 60
|
| Signature: | Signed and dated lower right |
| |
| Location: | New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut |
New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Gift of the Estate of George Deem, 2013. Accession Number 2013.54.136
The wittiness of George Deem's complicated pictorial conceits is aimed at a tender and vulnerable area: the interaction of art and daily experience. With a deadpan but skillful trompe l'oeil the artist incorporates parodies and quotations from art of the past into settings whose banality is made entertainingly absurd by these intrusions. (Dennis Adrian, Guest Curator, in Visions/Painting and Sculpture, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1976; exhibition catalogue, p. 42).
Inscribed twice on the reverse: 60 x 50 cm / "The Immaculate Conception" / February, 1971
The Immaculate Conception and
The Visitation (Composition in Black and Yellow) These two paintings are inevitable when the artist's eye sees these images every day -- in roadside chapels, in the interiors of grocery stores and banks, on post cards: these images are part of the landscape in Italy. (George Deem June 1, 1978, Written for
An Exhibition of Paintings by George Deem, June 12 - July 8, 1978, Merida Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky).
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
Merida Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky
On View Downtown Gallery, Indianapolis, Indiana
