Hairy Who? artists offer quirky perspective on life

Two of the three solo exhibitions recently opened at Wake Forest University's Hanes Art Gallery celebrate the enduring vitality of a quirky, loosely defined art movement that emerged in Chicago during the late 1960s.

One of these shows is a mini-retrospective consisting of watercolors by Gladys Nilsson, and the other is a selection of prints by her husband, Jim Nutt. They were core members of a group of Chicago artists who designated themselves the Hairy Who?, an absurd name inspired by an inside joke among the artists.

Like many other artists of their generation, Nilsson, Nutt and their fellow Hairy Who? travelers reacted against the seriousness of abstract expressionism. In their case, this reaction took the form of playfully distorted, often grotesque figural art influenced by surrealism, comic books and outsider art.

Still active after more than 40 years, they have both continued to work in this vein.

Nilsson's show is made up of 16 watercolors that represent every decade of her career. There's no dead space in Nilsson's highly activated picture planes with their riotous color combinations, wildly skewed perspectives and deliberately inconsistent scales.

The contorted, cartoonish figures that interact in these claustrophobic compositions typically feature oddly shaped heads and bodies, and ridiculously elongated, spaghettilike limbs.

Thematically, Nilsson takes good-natured, satirical aim at human desires, foibles and preoccupations. The animal instincts that underlie much of human behavior are emphasized in works featuring characters that combine human features with those of animals: dogs in "Meeting the Dogites" (1969) and rabbits in "Slack Rabbit" (1970).

Vanity is Nilsson's target in several of the show's watercolors, such as "Mirror-Mirror" (1992). Its central figure is a goofily curvaceous woman coping with a bad-hair day as she tries on a pink bathing suit.

At least one of the 17 peripheral figures represents her distorted reflection in a mirror, while other figures suggest reactions ranging from ridicule to voyeuristic excitement. A puzzling, parallel narrative is suggested by the small figures at the bottom, which represent cowboys waving white flags.

Nilsson plays variations on the vanity theme in several other works, including "An Entrance" (2004) and two from the early 1990s, "An Empriss" and "Royal Pass Times." She pokes fun at herself in a couple of self-portraits, "Me-Myself and I" (1995) and "Big Birthday Gladys" (2010), the show's largest and most recent piece.

The adjacent show of Nutt's work consists of intimately scaled prints from the 1960s and '70s, including a small display of cheaply produced "comic-book catalogs" for early "Hairy Who?" exhibitions. With their hypersexualized figures and scattershot compositional elements, these works have a more aggressive, wickedly perverse, mischievously sardonic edge than Nilsson's watercolors.

The etchings that make up most of Nutt's show are only about the size of playing cards, and their central figures are typically surrounded by a random assortment of much smaller figures, body parts and other isolated objects so small they aren't always readily identifiable. They have the feel of elaborately idiosyncratic doodles.

Nutt alludes to the difficulties that often characterize romance in his larger, hand-colored lithograph "Still No answer." Its central image of a man and woman facing each other suggests a moment from a tense encounter playing out on a miniature movie screen. A tight concentration of wavy lines around the mouth of the blue-pompadoured male figure indicates that he's whimpering almost uncontrollably, and the brown-haired woman's face suggests an equal measure of discomfort.

Viewers are left to guess at this image's relationship to those isolated immediately below it: a cartoon snake and a droplet falling from a thimble, accompanied by the handwritten text fragment, "... it could have been nice."

The bold colors and rhythmic patterns that enliven the equally odd imagery on the catalogs indicate an affinity with the psychedelic art that proliferated in the late 1960s.

Running concurrently in the upstairs portion of the gallery is an exhibition of lively paintings and drawings by Richard Hull, a younger artist from Chicago. His longtime residence in Chicago and his work's strong linearity associates him with the Hairy Who? and other exponents of what has been called Chicago imagism. Unlike their art, Hull's is consistently abstract, even as it visually alludes to maps, mandalas and internal organs, among other references.