JIM NUTT American, b. 1938

Although Jim Nutt's name remains indelibly linked with “Hairy Who,” the group of Chicago artists exhibiting in the late 1960s and early 1970s and known for their perverse, surreal, and humorous psychosexual aesthetic, his work over the past four decades has had an almost singular focus: representations of a single imaginary figure. At a moment when the art world was dominated by New York abstraction, Nutt presented a provocative alternative that depicted lurid, malformed figures engaged in acts of violence, sexual perversion, and scatological humor with exacting precision. While the work unwittingly succeeded in challenging the reigning visual aesthetic, Nutt has insisted that the exhibits were simply “an enthusiastic response of wanting to make something.”

Nutt’s earlier works on paper often functioned as preparatory sketches for his luminous, portrait-like paintings; his recent drawings stand as complete works in their own right. They are a quietly virtuosic display of the artist’s exquisite and perfect control of line and form. Nutt draws in graphite on cold pressed paper, its toothy surface utterly unlike the smooth plexiglass on which he painted his earliest works. The paper’s rough texture is visible even in Nutt’s thin and exacting lines, some so light and delicate that one starts to wonder whether they are actually present or simply a trick of the eye. Erasure marks are apparent, too; tactile evidence that the artist remains as fastidious a draftsperson as ever, committed to the iterative process required to achieve his own standard of perfection.

Nutt’s work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Ball State Museum of Art, Muncie, IN; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI; Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; amongst others. Jim Nutt lives and works in Chicago.