Art Green @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC - Hairy Who?

Art Green: Hairy Who?

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

September 8 – October 21, 2023

ART GREEN

Immoderate Abstention, 1969 

Oil on canvas, 66 x 55 1/2 inches

© Art Green

Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents Art Green: Hairy Who? The exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s work of the 1960s, his most formative decade.

In 1961, Art Green enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the intention of studying industrial design. In his first year, however, the artist made a fateful shift to painting and drawing. Art Green’s career, and those of five other recent SAIC graduates (James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum), was quick to launch. In 1966, these alumni held the first of what would become a legendary series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. The artists’ styles were assertively idiosyncratic, but most had trained with professors Kathleen Blackshear and Paul  Wieghardt and adapted some of their respective Surrealist and German Expressionist tendencies—features particularly noticeable in Art Green’s work. Green adds that teachers Vera Berdich, Tom Kapsalis, and Ray Yoshida had integral influence. By the end of the packed decade in 1969, Art Green accepted a teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, marrying Natalie Novotny in the same year, whose Art Institute education in pattern and fabric design became a strong and continuing influence on his work.

The work in the exhibition demonstrates the remarkable speed with which Art Green established a rich personal iconography consisting of archetypal images of ice cream cones, wood grain patterns, billowing flames, and perfectly polished fingernails. These same totemic images populate his work to this day.

In Absolute Purity (1967) Art Green places a supersized cone of soft serve dangerously close to a plump female leg that billows flames and smoke like an industrial chimney. To add to the confusion, the artist freely mixes visual modes from the photorealistic to the cartoonish. The result is an uneasy, centrifugal chaos. As the Canadian artist and critic Gary Michael Dault said of the painting, “there is so much going on it all has to be lashed together to keep it, you feel, from flying in your face.”

Art Green’s work is packed with paradoxes and impossibilities. Each is phantasmagoric but orderly. Items are fastened and balanced in agreement with the strict but inscrutable mechanical rules that undergird each universe. In paintings like Disclosing Enclosure (1968), Green ties spatial dimensions into a Gordian Knot. Two disembodied fingers unzip a two-dimensional face—revealing ice cream that oxymoronically bursts into flames. When an object is zipped open, showing itself to be a two-dimensional surface, it becomes three-dimensional in its new configuration. The counterintuitive logic and potent symbolism beg to be decoded, but any attempt results in a recursive paradox. The paintings are themselves a cycle of perpetual reconciliation and rupture.

Art Green’s work has been the subject of over 26 solo exhibitions, including nine at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1974, 1976, 1976–1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981–1982, 1983, 1986, Chicago and New York), three at Bau-Xi Gallery (1974, 1979, and 1983, Vancouver and Toronto), and one at Corbett vs. Dempsey (2011–2012, Chicago). His work has also been featured in more than 120 group exhibitions, including Human Response/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); 12 Chicago Artists (1995, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.); and Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin). In 2005, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario mounted Heavy Weather, the artist’s first career retrospective. In early 2009, the CUE Art Foundation, New York hosted a solo exhibition of Art Green’s work, curated by Jim Nutt.

In the last decade, Art Green’s work was featured in What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present (2014, RISD Museum, Providence); Homegrown: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Permanent Collection (2015–2016, Art Institute of Chicago); The Next Generation: Chicago Imagists from the Smart Collection (2016, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago); Hairy Who? 1966–1969 (2018–2019, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), and How Chicago! Imagists 1960s–1970s (2019, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, University of London).

Art Green’s paintings are featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Art Green.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

Chicago Imagists at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

Chicago Imagists

at the Madison Museum 

of Contemporary Art

September 11, 2011 – January 15, 2012

The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) presents a major exhibition of works by the Chicago Imagists. On view in the museum’s main galleries, Chicago Imagists at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art includes more than 75 works in a variety of media: paintings; watercolors; collages; prints; sculptures; and artists’ ephemera, including comic books and decals.

A key component of Chicago Imagists at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art are consummate paintings, sculptures, and unique works on paper from the museum’s Bill McClain Collection of Chicago Imagism. Many of the nearly 100 works made available to the museum by Bill McClain in 2010 will be presented to a public audience for the first time as part of the exhibition. William H. McClain, Halvorson Professor of Bacteriology, Emeritus, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, built his exceptional holdings of Chicago Imagist works over thirty years of close contact with the artists. The exhibition also features a number of major gifts to MMoCA from the Raymond K. Yoshida Living Trust and Kohler Foundation, Inc.

Imagist History

In the late 1960s, art audiences were introduced to a vibrant new group of artists who would soon be identified collectively as the Chicago Imagists. The Imagists initially showed their work between 1966 and 1971 at the Hyde Park Art Center. Don Baum, artist and director of the center, facilitated several exhibitions that included the work of, most significantly, Roger Brown, Sarah Canright, James Falconer, Ed Flood, Art Green, Philip Hanson, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Suellen Rocca, Barbara Rossi, and Karl Wirsum. These young artists banded together variously to present their art in a series of exhibitions with titles such as Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, False Image, Marriage Chicago Style, and Chicago Antigua. Most of the artists were native to Chicago, in their later twenties, and current or former students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). One-third of the artists group were women, an unusual percentage for the period, and a marked contrast to the male-dominant field of modern art in New York City and elsewhere.

Pivotal to the Imagists’ development were the SAIC instructors who urged their students to explore a great variety of traditions in art, both western and non-western. Most notable in this respect was the artist Ray Yoshida, who began teaching at the school in 1959. Yoshida encouraged his students to seek visual experiences outside of the fine arts—drawing especially from popular culture as exemplified by magazines, comics, and what Yoshida called “trash treasures” gathered from outdoor flea markets such as Chicago’s Maxwell Market.

Although the Pop artists in New York, Los Angeles, and London, who were a generation older, also drew inspiration from the everyday urban world and popular culture, the Imagists nevertheless crafted an original art. Their works were characterized by personal fantasy and executed with brilliant color, graphic strength, free line, and exceptional workmanship. With broader sources of inspiration than the Pop artists, and a brand of exuberant and irreverent satire all their own, the Imagists spoke to the political and social foibles—as well as the absurdities and whimsy—of the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s. Audiences quickly caught the unique character of their art.

Characteristics of Imagist Art

Comic-book style plays an important role in Roger Brown’s Sudden Avalanche (1972), where a cartoon town of brightly colored, toylike structures, is threatened with a natural disaster that does not seem to interfere with the self-absorbed dramas of the men and women silhouetted in the windows. Although amusing, the scene is disquieting, a frequent state of things in Imagist art that is also true for Philip Hanson’s Mezzanine (1969). In a mysterious and child-like setting reminiscent of Giorgio di Chirico’s empty, surrealist plazas, the four steps of a blue staircase may lead to a mezzanine. Beckoned to ascend, the viewer is unsure of what lies beyond: is it danger or pleasure?

Other important aspects of Chicago Imagism are seen in Jim Nutt’s freewheeling portrait Rosie Comon (1967–1968), which catches the spontaneous line, love of caricature, and high wit of Imagist art. Rosie Comon (the title a pun on County Roscommon in Ireland and a reference to the Chicago Irish) is a brawling kind of reddish-haired guy, bare-chested with tattoos on his back. Both human and slightly bestial in the face, he has a nose sprouting a grotesque appendage of unknown function. If “Rosie” is a perfectly acceptable Irish nickname for a boy, carrying it must nonetheless encourage a certain toughness to succeed.

Reflecting feminist concerns, the tightly corseted figure cut off at the neck and legs in Ramberg’s Untitled #15 (1982) is a recurring motif in the artist’s work that explores gender stereotypes. In brash comic-book simplifications, the figure’s iconic presentation speaks to the fetisizing of the female form that produces both allure and cruelty.

Components of MMoCA’s Chicago Imagist Project

Chicago Imagists at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art will be accompanied by a complementary exhibition in the museum’s State Street Gallery. Titled Chicago School: Imagists in Context, this concurrent exhibition features works by artists who were geographically, philosophically, and artistically associated with the Imagists, including Robert Barnes, Phyllis Bramson, Don Baum, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, June Leaf, Robert Lostutter, Peter Saul, Hollis Sigler, and H.C. Westermann, among others. Both exhibitions were organized by the museum’s curator of collections, Richard H. Axsom; director, Stephen Fleischman; curatorial associate, Leah Kolb; and former curator of exhibitions, Jane Simon.

Chicago Imagists, MMoCA, 2011 

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication titled Chicago Imagists. This richly illustrated 168-page book is the most extensive reference available on the artists, their works, and the context within which the group emerged and flourished. The volume includes essays by Lynne Warren, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Cécile Whiting, professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine; and the exhibition curators. 

MADISON MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART - MMoCA

227 State Street, Madison, WI 53703

mmoca.org