Alexi Worth

States

Lynne Warren

Jennifer R. Gross

Favoring fantastical invention, biting wit, and distorted figuration, with roots in mid-20th-century pop culture, Jim Nutt creates wildly original work ranging from paintings on Plexiglas to phantasmagoric portraits of imaginary women. Nutt (b. 1938) first exerted his artistic influence in the 1960s as a member of Hairy Who, a group of artists who, along with other Chicago artists of the era, are more commonly referred to as the imagists. Since 1990 he has focused exclusively on rendering female heads with radically distorted features in spare line drawings and richly detailed paintings accompanied by customized frames. Working with tiny brushes and thinned acrylic paint, Nutt often spends a year creating a single portrait. Jim Nutt is the first major publication on the artist in almost two decades, as well as the first to concentrate on Nutt's portraits. Detailing 70 of the artist's works from 1966 to the present, this important selected retrospective examines these paintings and drawings through their precedents in Nutt's work and demonstrates the artist's consistent and inimitable contributions to the art world.

Coming Into Character

Jim Nutt

Carroll Dunham

" This catalogue documents four interconnected bodies of work: A Wrestling Place series--depicting two Herculean figures mid-tussle against a barren panorama; Self-Examination paintings--a wrestler's intimately folded body represented within a tensely cropped picture plane; the Wrestler suite--individual portraits of the brawling protagonists standing in profile, facing away from the viewer and exposing scuffed, bruised backs against otherworldly blue backdrops; and The Golden Age--scenes rendered in pencil on gessoed linen."--https://store.blumandpoe.com/products/carroll-dunham-wrestlers (viewed on April 3, 2018). - Catalog of an exhibition held at Blum et Poe, Los Angeles, California, April 28-June 17, 2017.

Alexi Worth

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