JIM NUTT: "Trim" and Other Works, 1967-2010
Past exhibition
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OverviewDavid Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce "'Trim' and Other Works: 1967-2010," by Jim Nutt (b. 1938, American). The show will feature drawings and paintings from the late 1960's until now, with an emphasis on recent works.
Jim Nutt is widely identified as being a member of the Imagists, a group of artists who were included in exhibitions curated by the artist Don Baum in the 1960's and 70's at the Hyde Park Art Center, one of Chicago's oldest alternative art spaces. Other members of the Imagists include Ed Paschke, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, and H.C. Westermann. More specifically, Nutt was a member of an informal group of artists that included other graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum. Together they organized three exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960's under the name "Hairy Who." They later exhibited at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
The Hairy Who aesthetic reflected influences from a wide variety of genres, from the masterworks at the Art Institute to the shows of contemporary art at the Arts Club of Chicago and at the major commercial galleries, not to mention primitive and Native American art. They largely ignored the vogue at the time for New York abstraction, opting to incorporate European styles such as Surrealism and Expressionism with the illustrational style of American comic books.
Nutt's works from his Hairy Who days are vivid, grotesque, aggressively sexual and psychological. He represents improbable figures with truncated limbs, protruding genitals, wiry hairs and distorted bodies. Language also comes into play when Nutt incorporates jokes, clichés, puns and naughty innuendo that add another dimension to his work. One of the early pieces in our exhibition is "Miss Sue Port" (1967-68), a painting in acrylic on Plexiglas that brings to mind the mass cultural appeal of the pin up photo. Written alongside the buxom babe is the phrase, "inches off your waste," spoofing old magazine ads for women's undergarments while inserting a little potty humor into the mix. Posed in a triumphant, superhero stance, "Sue" appears to be hitting herself on the head and vomiting while a bare breast jiggles with a TV cartoon-style "boink."
In the 1970's, Nutt's characters encounter one another on bare theater stages, acting out the battle of the sexes while gremlins and other creatures look on. Sometimes clothed, most of the time naked, the figures inhabiting Nutt's proscenia gesture and beckon at one another. It's not always clear exactly what is being communicated, bringing to mind the famously enigmatic tableaux of Balthus.
The uncanny mystery of Nutt's works is conveyed most convincingly in the portraits of women he began to draw and paint in the late 1980's, a series he continues to the present day. Elegant and restrained, these portraits still pack the perverse punch of his Hairy Who days. Though the muted browns and blues of Nutt's color palette in the earlier portraits evoke the soft candlelit atmospheres of Rembrandt and Géricault, the recent paintings on view in the exhibition have achieved the light, sunny frivolity of Ingres, rendered in lavenders, soft yellows and pale blues. Nutt radically deforms the features of his imaginary ladies, turning eyes into pinpoints and slits, eyebrows into furry caterpillars, noses into multicolored pudenda, and hair into Cubist abstractions. He then customizes painted frames to highlight the quirky personalities of each. Titled with monosyllabic names like "Plumb" (2004), "Pin" (2006), and "Trim" (2010), Nutt's portrait paintings have smooth, glasslike surfaces where each brushstroke seems to have been applied with a hair. The recent drawings are meticulously executed with hard, sharp graphite on heavy watercolor paper. Without the chromatic distraction of his paintings, the works on paper show the drawn line to be Nutt's main ally.
Jim Nutt was born in Pittsfield, MA and currently lives outside of Chicago, IL. A 1994 retrospective organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum travelled to the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Nutt's works are located in numerous American and European collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, the Smithsonian Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. "Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character," curated by Lynne Warren, will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in January 2011. This is Jim Nutt's third exhibition with David Nolan.
Please also join us for "Three Artists Talk About Jim Nutt: Steve DiBenedetto, David Humphrey, and Alexi Worth," on Saturday, May 8, at 2 pm. This event has been organized in conjunction with the first annual New York Gallery Week, from May 7 through May 10, 2010. For more information, please see www.newyorkgalleryweek.com. -
INSTALLATION SHOTS
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Jim NuttCoursing, 1966acrylic and collage on plexiglass with painted wood artist's frame and verso37 x 26 inches
94 x 66 cm -
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Jim NuttPin, 2006acrylic on linen with mdf frame23 3/8 x 23 3/8 inches
59.4 x 59.4 cm -
Jim NuttPlumb, 2004acrylic on linen in MDF frame26 3/8 x 25 3/8 inches
67.1 x 64.5 cm
16 x 15 inches (canvas) -
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Jim NuttTrim, 2010acrylic on linen with mdf frame25 3/8 x 24 3/8 inches
64.5 x 61.9 cm -
Jim NuttHold Still!! (Please), 1980-81colored pencil on paper12 1/2 x 17 inches
31.8 x 43.2 cm -
Jim NuttThere are Reasons, 1974colored pencil on Japanese paper12 1/4 x 16 1/4 in
31.1 x 41.3 cm -
Jim NuttAre you sure you want this?, 1975graphite on paper19 x 17 in
48.3 x 43.2 cm -
Jim NuttDrawing for "Did you Hear Something?", 1981graphite on grey BFK paper7 1/2 x 7 1/2 in
19.1 x 19.1 cm -
Jim NuttDrawing for "Trim", 2008graphite on paper15 x 14 inches
38.1 x 35.6 cm -
Jim NuttUntitled, 2008graphite on paper13 x 13 inches
33 x 33 cm -
Jim NuttUntitled, 2010graphite on paper13 x 13 inches
33 x 33 cm -
Jim NuttUntitled, 2010graphite on paper15 x 14 inches
38.1 x 35.6 cm -
Jim NuttUntitled, 2010graphite on paper15 x 14 inches
38.1 x 35.6 cm -
Jim NuttUntitled, 2010graphite on paper15 x 14 inches
38.1 x 35.6 cm -
Jim NuttUntitled (Drawing for "Twig"), 2010graphite on paper15 x 14 inches
38.1 x 35.6 cm -
Jim NuttWhat's your name?, 1975graphite on paper7 5/8 x 5 5/8 in
19.4 x 14.3 cm
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Press
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Jim Nutt: David Nolan Gallery
Donald Kuspit · Artforum August 30, 2010What struck me about this exhibition of Jim Nutt’s works (perhaps it had something to do with the tidy elegance of the installation) was not the monstrousness of his figures,... -
Jim Nutt, "Trim and Other Works: 1967–2010"
Chris Bors · Artillery Magazine July 14, 2010JIM NUTT, part of a large number of artists known as the Imagists, who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in the 1960s and '70s in show... -
JIM NUTT
David St.-Lascaux · The Brooklyn Rail July 23, 2010Jim Nutt is back in New York, sans straightjacket. Once a wildman, he was part of Chicago’s Imagist/Hairy Who movement, back in ’66 when Hairy meant huge, when Ed “Big... -
Refined Nutt: A Jim Nutt retrospective at Nolan
Deven Golden · artcritical June 23, 2010Jim Nutt is part of the Chicago Imagists group which emerged in the 1960s as a regional version of Pop Art. His fellows included Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, Barbara Rossi,... -
Art in Review; Jim Nutt: ‘Trim’ and Other Works: 1967-2010
Roberta Smith · The New York Times June 17, 2010David Nolan Gallery 527 West 29th Street Chelsea Through June 26 Jim Nutt works slowly, so an exhibition of three new, and newish, paintings and seven drawings mostly finished this... -
Jim Nutt: "Trim" and Other Works: 1967-2010
Mario Naves · City Arts June 15, 2010Jim Nutt's paintings and drawings, subject of an adumbrated overview at David Nolan Gallery, are testimony, underplayed and undeniable to the vital role craft plays in generating aesthetic vitality. For... -
Goings on about Town: Art: Jim Nutt
The New Yorker May 20, 2010The wacky Chicagoan has begun to look canonical. A pocket retrospective revisits rowdydow work from Nutt's days as a 'Hairy Who' Surrealist, in the sixties, and then jumps to his... -
Jim Nutt, "Trim and Other Works: 1967–2010"
Paul Laster · Time Out New York May 18, 2010A founder of Chicago's Hairy Who group presents a little bit of his past and his present. A Pop artist with a Surrealistic bent, Jim Nutt is widely recognized as...
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Artist
