Drawings 1967-1970 Catalog Excerpt

September 27th, 2010 by Dan Nadel

Here’s an excerpt from my catalog essay for current Karl Wirsum show. Now go forth and see the show and buy the catalog!

Karl Wirsum and his wife, Lorri Gunn, live in a bright and welcoming house built in the 1920s and set back on a tree-lined street in the West Lakeview section of Chicago. Up the stairs and through the painting studio is a sunny alcove stacked waist-deep with sketchbooks, each overflowing with paper placeholders and often opened to a single image. Narrow passageways wind through the stacks and lead to massive tables that are piled with still-larger sheets of paper and yet more sketchbooks. Also there is a very enticing attic, from which Karl will occasionally pull a vintage something or other. Watching Karl nimbly dance between drawings, notepads, packages, gewgaws, and toys is inspiring but mostly nerve-racking. Just as I notice a fine-looking drawing peeking out from underneath a four-foot-deep pile, Karl jumps over to retrieve it. He’s tugging on it and the pile is teetering and . . . nope, the pile doesn’t fall. All is well. There’s the drawing, and it’s a beauty from 1968.

The process for this exhibition and catalogue began amid those stacks and continued as Derek Eller and I retreated downstairs to the living room and thumbed through numerous sketchbooks from the 1960s and early ’70s. These books contain the only drawings Karl made during this period I initially targeted this era because it roughly coincides with the five Hairy Who exhibitions and the publication of the group’s four offset-printed comic-book-style catalogues (which contained only original work, studies for which are on pages four and five) between 1966 and 1969. The Hairy Who—which gathered Karl and fellow youthful Chicagoans Suellen Rocca, Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Art Green, and Jim Falconer all under a single (changing) roof—marked a generational shift in Chicago art and was followed by other group exhibitions of younger contemporaries such as Roger Brown and Christina Ramberg.

Karl, born and raised in Chicago, graduated the Art Institute in 1961, but by the time of that first Hairy Who show, his aesthetic had been shaped by a wealth of influences and experiences. A fascination with Mezzo-American art, Peruvian pottery, and the schematic, grotesque comic-strip art of George Wunder (Terry and the Pirates) and Chester Gould (Dick Tracy) had combined with an engagement of the city itself—an urban stew of hand-painted signage, eccentric characters, and gritty music—to form a unique sensibility…

And there’s more…