Untitled

During the 1960s and 1970s Gladys Nilsson invented cartoonish figures based on animal-human hybrids, similar to the ones in this mixed media work from around 1968. (See Smart Museum 2007.164.) They appeared notably in the commercially-printed original drawings that she contributed to the comic books that were produced by Nilsson, alongside other emerging Chicago Imagists James Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum for the Hairy Who exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center on the South Side of Chicago (1966‒1968). The influence of the reverse Plexiglas painting techniques that were popular among many of her Chicago Imagist colleagues, among them Ed Flood, Jim Nutt, Barbara Rossi and Karl Wirsum, is evident in the delicate details that she painted directly on the glazing. These details contribute to the complex modulation of the light and dark areas of the drawing behind it that is made up of stippling, hatching, zigzagging and curling lines. Looking closely at this work is rewarded by amusing details in odd places, such as a tiny collaged piece of newspaper print featuring Santa Claus emerging from the torso of one figure.