Jim Nutt "'Trim' and Other Works: 1967-2010"
David Nolan Gallery
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David Nolan Gallery presents "'Trim' and Other Works: 1967-2010," by Jim Nutt (b. 1938, American). The show will feature drawings and paintings from the late 1960's until now, with an emphasis on recent works. Jim Nutt is widely identified as being a member of the Imagists, a group of artists who were included in exhibitions curated by the artist Don Baum in the 1960's and 70's at the Hyde Park Art Center, one of Chicago's oldest alternative art spaces. More specifically, Nutt was a member of an informal group of artists that included other graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum. Together they organized three exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960's under the name "Hairy Who."
The uncanny mystery of Nutt's works is conveyed most convincingly in the portraits of women he began to draw and paint in the late 1980's, a series he continues to the present day. Elegant and restrained, these portraits still pack the perverse punch of his Hairy Who days. Though the muted browns and blues of Nutt's color palette in the earlier portraits evoke the soft candlelit atmospheres of Rembrandt and Géricault, the recent paintings on view in the exhibition have achieved the light, sunny frivolity of Ingres, rendered in lavenders, soft yellows and pale blues. Nutt radically deforms the features of his imaginary ladies, turning eyes into pinpoints and slits, eyebrows into furry caterpillars, noses into multicolored pudenda, and hair into Cubist abstractions. He then customizes painted frames to highlight the quirky personalities of each. Titled with monosyllabic names like "Plumb" (2004), "Pin" (2006), and "Trim" (2010), Nutt's portrait paintings have smooth, glasslike surfaces where each brushstroke seems to have been applied with a hair. The rece nt drawings are meticulously executed with hard, sharp graphite on heavy watercolor paper. Without the chromatic distraction of his paintings, the works on paper show the drawn line to be Nutt's main ally.
Media
Schedule
from May 05, 2010 to June 26, 2010