Karl Wirsum

Karl Wirsum (born 1939) was a member of the legendary Chicago artist community The Hairy Who (whose other members included Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt and Suellen Rocca). Best known as a painter, he has also worked in printmaking, sculpture, digital art and marionettes. Pristine, cartoonish, flatly graphic and brightly chromatic, his paintings portray solitary, hallucinatory, often somewhat demonic characters, depicted against spare backdrops. This catalogue commemorates Wirsum’s fall 2013 exhibition at Derek Eller gallery in New York. It presents 25 new paintings and drawings accompanied by questions to the artist (and his answers) from an all-star roster of curators and artists, including Gary Panter, Carter E. Foster, Chris Ware, KAWS, Erik Parker, Jeff Koons, Mark Pascale, Robert Storr, Robert Cozzolino and Peter Saul.