Karl Wirsum exhibited in the first “Hairy Who” exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center more than 40 years ago and is one of the fantastic figurative artists who became known as Imagists, dominating Chicago taste in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Unlike some of his colleagues, however, Wirsum had not received a full-scale retrospective in his hometown, so the exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, of more than 150 pieces from 45 years of work, is a celebration of some importance.
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It shows the artist to have created an astonishing range of objects, from paintings, drawings and sculpture to toys, puppets and holograms, which steadily have become more economical in expression and refined in execution. It also shows a love in equal measure for ethnographic art and working-class Americana, which the artist has drawn upon and combined with puns plus a wholly personal treatment of the figure to make what once was praised as “a frenzied display of elements from popular culture and ordinary life.”
Such frenzy is at once the strength and limitation of the work. Excepting the earliest, most orthodox paintings, there scarcely is a dull moment in color or line to any of these pieces. But the stridency — emphasized by the center’s loud and teeming installation — does get to you, and soon enough a viewer comes to long for any kind of repose, outward or inward, to relieve the sense of constantly being battered with an excess of, for want of a better word, play.
Wirsum was among the most consistent of the Imagists in his use of a flat cartoon style. He wrings from it many satisfying formal variations, and for some viewers that will be more than enough. But figurative art in Chicago always placed a premium on content, and I would argue that Wirsum’s style has restricted content, withholding it from penetrating deeply.
The thrill of his best pieces — the densest, most strongly vibrating ones from the late 1960s — is immediate, physical and electric. By a decade later, in the works that look as if they had been drawn in neon, this kind of excitation is reduced to an elegant hum, despite the knottiness of the forms and touches of menace. More recent paintings do little for me despite their crispness and tireless exploration of form.
Perhaps because of Wirsum’s large public mural, the 1991 “Bug Plug” that for a long time was on the only building standing on Block 37, his kind of fantasy has been assumed to be childlike and gentle. The many objects apart from paintings in the exhibition would seem to confirm this, as there are masks and kites and puppets and wood cutouts that suggest the innocent world of nursery toys. Yet, again, a frenzied animation runs as an undercurrent through even these pieces, giving many the buzz of caffeine where something milder might be expected.
This is a show that, like the Energizer Bunny, keeps going and going and going.
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“Karl Wirsum: Winsome Works(some)” continues at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington Blvd., through June 24. 312-744-6630.