Karl Wirsum

This catalogue compiles the drawings, sculptures and paintings created by Karl Wirsum (born 1939) in the 1970s--the artist’s most restless period geographically and artistically, as he moved back and forth from Chicago to Sacramento and experimented with materials, formats and visual languages. With the close of the 1960s and the final Hairy Who exhibition, Wirsum began moving away from conventional art objects and into puppets, display signage, kites and mannequins. His visual language changed too, forsaking curvilinear forms and high-key color paintings for a hard-edged geometric language with fewer colors and a focus on the possibilities of working with the entire human form, not just the bust. The works included here--in over 40 images--range from a series of "cardbroads," full-figured malleable chipboard humanoids held together by grommets; to handcrafted painted wood marionettes; to paintings and drawings of ice skaters possessed of bulbous appendages.

American artist Karl Wirsum (born 1939) was a member of the legendary Chicago artist community The Hairy Who (whose other members included Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt and Suellen Rocca). Best known as a painter, he has also worked in printmaking, sculpture, digital art and marionettes. Pristine, cartoonish, flatly graphic and brightly chromatic, his paintings portray solitary, hallucinatory, often somewhat demonic characters, depicted against spare backdrops. This catalogue commemorates Wirsum’s fall 2013 exhibition at Derek Eller gallery in New York. It presents 25 new paintings and drawings accompanied by questions to the artist (and his answers) from an all-star roster of curators and artists, including Gary Panter, Carter E. Foster, Chris Ware, KAWS, Erik Parker, Jeff Koons, Mark Pascale, Robert Storr, Robert Cozzolino and Peter Saul.