Corey Postiglione (born 1942) is an American artist, art critic and educator. He is a member of the American Abstract Artists in New York, and known for precise, often minimalist work that "both spans and explores the collective passage from modernism to postmodernism" in contemporary art practice and theory. New Art Examiner co-founder Jane Allen, writing in 1976, described him as "an important influence on the development of contemporary Chicago abstraction." In 2008, Chicago Tribuneart critic Alan G. Artner wrote "Postiglione has created a strong, consistent body of work that developed in cycles, now edging closer to representation, now moving further away, but remaining rigorous in approach to form as well as seductive in markmaking and color."
Life
Born into a working-class, Italian-American family on the north side of Chicago, Postiglione first developed an interest in art at Lane Tech High School. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps and working a series of blue-collar jobs, he attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, graduating with a BFA in studio arts in 1971. He soon became active in a burgeoning art scene in Chicago, first exhibiting his work at Richard Gray Gallery, N.A.M.E., and Jan Cicero Gallery, and writing articles and reviews for the newly formed New Art Examiner. In 1990, he earned his MA in 20th Century Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studying under the postmodernist art critic Craig Owens, among others.
Postiglione has exhibited internationally, at numerous colleges and universities, and at venues such as The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, OK Harris Gallery, and the Hyde Park Art Center. He was honored with retrospective exhibitions at the Evanston Art Center in 2008 and the Koehnline Museum of Art, Des Plaines, Illinois in 2010. His artwork has been reviewed in publications including Artforum, New Art Examiner, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Daily News, and is included in many private and public collections, including the Purdue University Galleries Permanent Collection and the Koehnline Museum of Art Permanent Collection.
Postiglione is a founding member of the Chicago Art Critics Association and has taught at several Chicago institutions, including Columbia College Chicago, where he was a member of the art department faculty for over 30 years. He lives and works in Chicago with his wife, artist Kathie Shaw.
Work
In the early 1970s, Postiglione began creating minimalist drawings and paintings that were "striking for their purity of intent and realization" and "spare simplicity." Influenced by artists such as Frank Stella, Brice Marden, and Robert Mangold, these works explored the nature of paintings as objects, and often coupled severe geometric abstraction with a sensual celebration of gesture and materials. However, Postiglione's sensibility ran counter to the narrative-driven, representational aesthetic of the Chicago Imagists and Hairy Who, which included artists such as Roger Brown and Ed Paschke, and whose work dominated the Chicago art scene from the late 1960s into the 1980s.
For a time, Postiglione—described by critic Alice Thorson as "a prime mover in the geometric abstractionists' battle for recognition" in Chicago—and like-minded artists struggled to find a home beyond a handful of galleries supportive of their work, such as Jan Cicero and Roy Boyd. In response, Postiglione and four other artists—Carol Diehl, Tony Giliberto, Mary Jo Marks, and Frank Pannier—banded together as the self-named "Artists Anonymous" to call attention to the plight of local abstractionists.
Semiotic abstraction
Although Postiglione has maintained an abstract aesthetic to the present day, by 1978 he had begun to refashion 1960s hard-edged abstraction through a postmodern filter, creating metaphoric work with a visual connection to the life world that dissolved the opposition between abstraction and referentiality. His Scape and Passage works (1979-1986) drew comparisons to the paintings of Robert Moskowitz, reducing Chicago cityscapes and iconic structures like the Sears Tower to archetypal forms and shapes that paid "homage to the city's built environment (Daniel Burnham's grid plan, Frank Lloyd Wright's horizontal planes, Mies van der Rohe's vertical modules) and to the utopic vision its soaring edifices once embodied."