Deb Sokolow

Deb Sokolow is a Chicago-based artist and writer whose text-driven, diagrammatic drawings and artist books blend fact with fiction and speculate both comically and critically on a variety of topics, including architecture, the details of shadowy histories, the foibles of heads of state, organizational brainwashing and the lives of geniuses. Recent topics include Frank Lloyd Wright’s troubles with secretaries, an alternate career trajectory for would-be master illusionist David Copperfield, Kenneth Noland’s uninhabited orgasms inside a Reichian Therapy box, and the CIA’s failed assassination attempts on Castro. To quote Hyperallergic critic John Yau, who reviewed her 2016 solo show at Western Exhibitions, "For all the deadpan humor running through Sokolow’s work, along with a sharply attuned fascination with human foibles, one also senses her utter amazement: can people really be serious about these things? Are they really that important? If you find the answers disturbing, you are not alone."

Sokolow’s work has been included in the 4th Athens Biennale in Greece and in other group exhibitions at the Drawing Center in New York, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen in Germany, Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Solo exhibitions include the Abrons Art Center in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in which Sokolow’s 2013 MATRIX exhibition, Some Concerns About the Candidate, was reviewed in The New York Times. Her work has been reproduced for Creative Time’s Comics project, for the Swedish art magazine Paletten, and in Vitamin D2, a survey on contemporary drawing. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Sokolow has participated in residencies at Art Omi and Nordic Artists’ Centre in Norway. 

Courtesy of Artadia and Western Exhibitions.