Corbett vs. Dempsey is honored to present No Thing Skin Sets, an exhibition of recent works by the artist Pope.L (2001 Creative Capital Awardee). This is the gallery’s first exhibition with Pope.L and the first major gallery show of his work in Chicago.

One of the key figures in contemporary conceptual art, Pope.L was based in Chicago from 2010, when he started teaching at the University of Chicago, until his death in December of 2023, at the age of 68. Pope.L first came to international attention with a number of performance- and endurance-based pieces in the early 1990s, though he’d already been working for more than a decade by then.

His graduate studies at Rutgers University included a performance art class with Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, whose influence was profound and lifelong. Reflecting that lineage, right out of the gate, in performances such as Tompkins Square Crawl and later The Great White Way and Eating the Wall Street Journal, Pope.L established himself as an artist unbounded by the usual artistic silos, freely mixing performance with sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, and video.

Among the indelible, confounding works Pope.L presented in Chicago were the 2013 Renaissance Society exhibition Forlesen and the 2018 Art Institute of Chicago performance The Escape. Subtly, but through sheer force of intellectual rigor and nonconformist experimentation, Pope.L infused the city with his unorthodox way of thinking. It’s possible to consider the environment we now live in as post-Pope.L Chicago.