New Works in Watercolor

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Gladys Nilsson: New Works in Watercolor, an exhibition of works on paper at 545 West 20th Street. The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s recent watercolors, all painted between 2021 and 2022.

Gladys Nilsson has always been fascinated by close inspections and careful depictions of human interactions – celebrating the small things that go along with getting through the day, and eying the awkward and unconscious things people do to themselves when they do not think anyone is looking. In Wheee (2021), a sizable woman perched on a tree branch cranes her neck downward, inspecting a diminutive man at the base of the tree, like a scientist discovering some new, curious species. Nilsson, in all her work, displays a great and admirable affection for human eccentricities and goofiness. Through frame after frame, she explores satiric and sympathetic peculiarities of simple human life. The awkwardness of such looming bodies, with her comical approach to simple existence and interaction, becomes a celebration of seeing others and being seen, of the musings of display and spectatorship.

A Stretch too Far (2021) features Nilsson’s winding, playful imagery. Over a dozen major and minor characters partake in the festivities—peering at, touching, bumping noses, and grabbing at each other. A mischievous green man pulls a woman’s fleshy pink leg into the second frame. A row of swimmers forms a frieze at the bottom of the composition, unaware of the drama unfolding above. To the left and the right of the work, various figures wrap themselves around the swaying trees. The work indexes her stylistic hallmarks, as she playfully resurrects canonical painting conventions—the diptych, hierarchical scale, horror vacui, and continuous narrative—while assigning new functions and meanings to each within her idiosyncratic graphical style.

Nilsson first came to prominence in 1966, when she joined five other recent School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduates (James Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) for the first of a series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. The artists’ styles were assertively idiosyncratic, but most had trained with professors Kathleen Blackshear and Paul Wieghardt and adapted some of their respective Surrealist and German Expressionist tendencies. Nilsson skillfully integrates elements of both in her playful investigations into human sexuality and its inherent contradictions. Nilsson was the first member of the Hairy Who—and one of the first women in history—to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. In 1990, Nilsson joined the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she continues to teach today.

Since 1966, Nilsson’s work has been the subject of more than 50 solo exhibitions, including 16 at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1970–1979, 1981–1983, 1987, 1991, and 1994, Chicago and New York), two at The Candy Store (1971 and 1987, Folsom, California), and one at Hales Gallery (2019, London). Her work has also been featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as Human Concern/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin); and What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present (2014, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence). Most recently, Nilsson’s work appeared in The Candy Store (2018, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles), Hairy Who? 1966–1969 (2018–2019, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Chicago Imagists from the Phyllis Kind Collection (2019, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago), and How Chicago! Imagists 1960s–1970s (2019, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, University of London).

Nilsson’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Morgan Library, New York; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Gladys Nilsson.