Continuing through November 29, 2026

If you are sick and tired of being sick and tired of the sad state of the world, you should go see this retrospective exhibition of 115 works curated by Francesca Wilmott. Since the early 1960s, Chicago-based Gladys Nilsson has painted mostly female figures captured in states of unabashed reverie, their obstreperous bodies portrayed half-way between physical solidity and ectoplasmic ecstasy. Are they grotesque? They are certainly that, but not in any way we might normally think of when considering the term. Most often, they are silly and whimsical, looking as if muscle relaxers and hallucinogenic laughing gas had been administered to the contorted personages as if portrayed by Matisse and late-period Picasso.

The earliest works here date from 1962-1965, executed immediately after Nilsson’s graduation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Several feature a large female figure identified as “Gigantica,” a zany spoof on the eponymous main character in the 1958 science fiction film “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.” Only in Nilsson’s hands, the centrally positioned woman is plus-sized and faceless, sporting carrot-colored hair and furry legs while garbed in a yellow and black striped frock (or in one case, a bathing suit) while shuffling around lilliputian figures congregated near her ankles.

In 1966 Nilsson and her husband Jim Nutt threw in with a Chicago-based group of fellow SAIC graduates calling themselves the Hairy Who, united by their interest in eccentric figuration. They exhibited under that moniker on multiple occasions, most notably at the San Francisco Art Institute in the Spring of 1968. Soon after, Nilsson had a solo exhibition at the same gallery, and yet another at the Whtiney Museum in 1970. Nutt was offered a position on the faculty at Sacramento State College (now California State University at Sacramento), where he worked from the Fall of 1968 to the Spring of 1976. After that, they returned to Chicago, where they still live and work, both having taught at SAIC for decades.

One exemplary work of Nilsson’s from this early period is “Duck Troops” (1966), a small watercolor that makes great use of subtle chromatic bleeds set against other more opaque areas flowing through a composition that could be a landscape, a still life, or both. This work is typical of what Nilsson would go on to do throughout the 1970s, while other earlier works such as “The Trogans” (1967) have less color and a rougher edge to describe porcine figures trussed up in bondage gear, recalling the work of James Ensor, Richard Lindner, and the animated Betty Boop fantasies put out by the Fleisher Studios in the 1930s. Here, we see much less color and firmer figurative shapes painted front to back on Plexiglas, a technique echoed in other works executed in white or silver paint on black grounds.

Throughout her career Nilsson has primarily worked in watercolor, sometimes on a fairly large scale. Zany as they are, these works are also subtly playful. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she alternated between painting singular, slightly monstrous female protagonists with other works featuring crowded groups of figures that look like human-animal hybrids rescued from Dr. Moreau’s famous island. The fact that none of those figures are conventionally glamorous is to their credit, allowing for a seamless and artful synthesis of surrealistic, expressionistic and social realistic approaches to theme and style. Also worth remembering is that during most of that time, working in watercolor on paper was deemed to be too personal and too dainty to be taken seriously by the male-dominated art establishment. Nilsson always used those presumptions to her advantage by representing an extravagant comedy that belies the easy charm of her chosen materials. In works such as “By the Pier” (1987), Nilsson demonstrates that she is arguably the most prominent and accomplished master of the watercolor medium that we have seen in the past 60 years.

Nilsson often interjects collage elements into her work, increasingly so after 1995. Some of those additions are surprisingly subtle, barely noticeable in some works. For example, in “Fallish” (2015) a cyclopean female figure reaches down to grab a small collaged male figure in renaissance costume, her large, singular eye pasted sideways on her face. Smaller works on paper such as “The Big Step” (1993) are given more collage elements, such as a riverside landscape and a giant ankle clad in a yellow shoe taking a long step over the river. In “He, Moiself and Eye” (1995) a centrally positioned face with two mouths puffs on a cigarette, half buried in collaged image fragments indicating mania and domestic toil. 

The 2022 Venice Bienniale certified what many have known for decades, the tradition of female painters working in the Surrealist idiom. Indeed, the lesson that “the personal is the political” seems a good motto for this persistent trend, which has oftentimes reflected upon the relationships between the undomesticated body, desire and imagination. Nilsson’s work checks those boxes, adding to them a diaristic and confessional element reminding us of how strange everyday life can be. In so doing, it reflects a distinctly American optimism about getting things done when despair is taken off the table.