Karl Wirsum’s retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center is a culmination of forty years of creative expression by a man professionally known as an Imagist, a painter who has worked with a wide range of media, and a graphic artist who uses vivid colors, gestures, and symbology to bring his cartoon-like figures to life.
Lanny Silverman, the curator of the retrospective, has said, “Imagist Art is the reverence for sources of inspiration rather than the irony of Pop Art.” The Chicago Imagists, of which Wirsum was a member, consisted of a group of artists with similar styles who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s. Their seminal work was the antithesis of the urban Pop Art promulgated by New York artists at the time. Known for their grotesque images, surrealism, blue collar sensitivities, and even coarseness and vulgarity, the Imagists represented a new vanguard of “down-to-earth” artists showing reverence for all things that inspired them.
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