Gladys Nilsson


Gladys M. Nilsson is an American artist, one of the original Hairy Who Chicago Imagists, a group in the 1960s and 1970s who turned to representational art. Her paintings "set forth a surreal mixture of fantasy and domesticity in a continuous parade of chaotic images." She is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Jim Nutt.

Biography

Gladys Nilsson was born to Swedish immigrant parents. Her father was a factory worker for Sunbeam and her mother a waitress. She grew up on the north side of Chicago and attended Lake View High School, while also attending extracurricular drawing classes. Against her parents' blue collar sensibilities, she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she met her future husband, fellow student Jim Nutt. Nilsson and Nutt married in July 1961, and their son, Claude, was born in 1962. Although Nilsson originally painted with oil paints, she switched to watercolors when pregnant in order to avoid the hazards of turpentine. She initially found it difficult to strike a balance between motherhood and her career in painting, though she states that she never considered giving up painting.
In 1963, Nilsson and Nutt were introduced to School of the Art Institute of Chicago art history professor Whitney Halstead, who became a teacher, mentor, and friend. He introduced them in turn to Don Baum, exhibition director at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. In 1964 Nilsson and Nutt became youth instructors at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Artistic Style

Gladys Nilsson's influences were far ranging and included German Expressionism, 15th Century Italian painting, Egyptian tomb murals, Cubism, and, more specifically, Whitney Halstead, Kathleen Blackshear, James Ensor, George Grosz, Paul Klee, Georges Seurat, John Marin, and Charles Burchfield. The result was a style that bordered on surrealism and pop, fantasy and cartoon. She took the human figure as her main subject, magnifying, multiplying, and distorting these figures as she saw fit.

The Hairy Who Years

In 1964, Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson began to teach children's classes at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. They and James Falconer approached the center's exhibitions director, Don Baum, with the idea of a group show consisting of the three of them and Art Green and Suellen Rocca. Baum agreed, and also suggested they include Karl Wirsum. The name of the group show, "Hairy Who?", became the name of the group. It was coined by Karl Wirsum as a reference to WFMT art critic Harry Bouras. There were exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1966, 1967, 1968, and 1969. The 1968 exhibition traveled to the San Francisco Art Institute, and the last show, in 1969, traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Later career

In 1969, the influential Chicago gallery owner Phyllis Kind agreed to represent Nilsson and Jim Nutt, giving both of them their first solo shows. In that same year Nilsson and Nutt moved to Sacramento, California, where he was an assistant professor of art at Sacramento State College. In 1973, Nilsson was the first Hairy Who member to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Two of her paintings were stolen from the show. In 1974 Nilsson and her family returned to Chicago. They have lived in Wilmette since 1976.
Her overall style has not shown significant development since the Hairy Who years. From the 1960s through to today, she continues to crowd her paintings with wild allegories of human debauchery that remain refined and elegant despite the wackiness of the figures. Loopy people are often woven into heterosexual pairings and though their bodies may appear to react to stimulation, it seems just as possible that the protruding genitalia and bulging breasts are more a result of the forces within the structure of the composition. There are also strong themes of human existence that range from childhood to motherhood, coming of age to female fantasies of male adoration.
Though her focus has always been watercolor on paper, Nilsson has also worked with collage, increasingly so in 2014. She admits that at a young age she loved playing with cut-out paper dolls. In her recent work, Nilsson cuts out imagery from fashion magazines to explore female ideals of beauty.
She had a retrospective of her art in the spring of 2010 at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago.

Exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions

1971
1973
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1979
1979–1980
1984
1993
1996
2000
2003
2006
2010