Georganne Deen
Georganne Deen is an artist and poet whom the LA Times described as charming, fierce and inspiring. Born in Fort Worth Texas, she wrote poetry and prose from an early age with a Goya-esque eye for subjects deemed inviolable in polite society.
At East Texas State University (now Texas A&M - Commerce) she connected with a group of irreverent artists dedicated to the experimental narrative, underground comics, and their incendiary, highly nuanced documentation of human nature. This was the fertile ground from which her project, a schema of her emotional life in paintings, emerged. A major depressive event in her teens lead to her understanding that mental illness was driven culturally as well as familially, which became the focus of her work. In 1980 she moved to California to attended California Institute of the Arts where she cultivated a vocabulary both personal and universal to communicate the psychic complexities of the inner life. Deen would continue this project for the next 45 years as she reported from the depths and heights of consciousness. She lives in Joshua Tree, California with her husband, John Pohl, and her little dog Ru.
Deen has had solo exhibitions at The Power Plant, Toronto, The MAC, Dallas, The Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, Van Horn, Dusseldorf, Christopher Grimes, Santa Monica. Group exhibitions include LA County Museum of Art, The Drawing Center, NY, ENTWISTLE, London, The Aldrich Museum, Conn, Jeffrey Deitch, L.A. Mary Boone, N.Y. Villa Merkel, Esslingen Germany. Her work is held in the collections of The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Collection Ringier, Switzerland, Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Central Cultural Asbaek, Majorca, Spain, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Palm Beach, Peter Norton, New York, Wilhelm Schuermann, Berlin, Olbricht Collection, Essen, Germany, Claud Albrighton, Dallas, Tom Patchett, Santa Monica, Fernando Fernández Garcia, Spain, Neuberger Berman, New York.