The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition by the acclaimed American artist Gladys Nilsson to be held in Reading, Vermont from 10 May – 30 November 2025.  This show features over fifteen of Nilsson’s vibrant and irreverent works, from her earliest jewel-like watercolors made in the mid-1960s to saturated and densely layered large-scale paintings completed in the past decade. As one of the foremost Chicago artists of her generation and a member of the famed Hairy Who, this show highlights Nilsson’s continued figurative experiments in form, color, texture and pattern.

In the early watercolor, Sunset Stomp (1968), a cast of characters – overlapping and entangled, male and female, animal and humanoid – stomp around a frenzied and vibrant composition as a flurry of smaller figures grab and dangle from their clothes and shoes. Although Nilsson has always featured the human body, and primarily women, as her subject, her characters are often abstracted, wild and droll. Crisply delineated from each other, the shifting size of Nilsson’s figures is not hierarchical, reflecting different approaches to scale that she has encountered in Renaissance paintings, the fantastical scenes of Hieronymus Bosch, and the varied size of clothing ads in the Sears catalogs she flipped through as a child.  Despite differences in size, Nilsson looks upon all her characters with equal importance. Sunset Stomp was exhibited in the fourth Hairy Who exhibition held at the San Francisco Art Institute from 3 through 29 May 1968. It is a rare example of a surviving work by Nilsson from this specific exhibition and an essential representation of her work from this time.

While Nilsson is well known for the small-scale watercolors that she began exhibiting in the mid-1960s, she has also dedicated much of her career to painting with acrylic on canvas, panel, and Plexiglas. After 1970, Nilsson returned to working on canvas with saturated compositions often anchored by one or two central figures. In Boating (2018), a large female figure straddles a canoe that seems impossibly scaled and precariously positioned with one end sinking into the water and the other elevated towards a bright strip of orange cliffs dotted by whimsically colored plants. The otherworldly, aquamarine, white-haired woman gazes upwards with a faint smile as she is supported by her male counterpart who also gazes upwards and perhaps up her skirt. In line with her characteristic use of hierarchical scale and horror vacui (a Latin phrase that means "fear of empty spaces"), Nilsson fills the composition with several disproportionally small figures who dive or parachute out of the boat, while others float on a nearby log.

Gravity suspended, a male and female couple hover above the forest floor in Nilsson’s diptych, Painting Nature (2018) which is brimming with densely layered and intricately detailed patterns, shapes and colors. With a can of paint in one hand and a brush in the other, the female figure appears to be painting her environment, or, painting nature. Facing her, her male counterpart harvests branches and twigs dotted with bright green globes, perhaps apples. A seasoned visitor of the Art Institute of Chicago, Nilsson has cited inspiration from many of the works in the collection, including the famous diptych by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Adam and Eve (1533-37), which bears a formal resemblance to this work.

Gladys Nilsson was born in Chicago in 1940 and grew up visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually attending the School of the Art Institute from 1958 to 1962 to study painting. She first came to prominence in 1966, when she joined five other recent Art Institute graduates (Jim Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) for the first of a series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. In 1973, she became one of the first women to have a solo-exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1990, she accepted a teaching position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is now a professor.

Since 1966, Nilsson’s work has been the subject of more than 50 solo exhibitions, including 16 at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1970–1979, 1981–1983, 1987, 1991, and 1994, Chicago and New York), two at The Candy Store (1971 and 1987, Folsom, California), and one at Hales Gallery (2019, London). Her work has also been featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as Human Concern/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin); and What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present (2014, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence). Most recently, Nilsson’s work appeared in The Candy Store (2018, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles), Hairy Who? 1966–1969 (2018–2019, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Chicago Imagists from the Phyllis Kind Collection (2019, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago), How Chicago! Imagists 1960s–1970s (2019, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, University of London), and solo exhibitions at Garth Greenan Gallery (2014, 2017, 2022, New York), including a major joint exhibition, Gladys Nilsson: Honk! Fifty Years of Painting jointly held at Garth Greenan Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery in 2020.    

Nilsson’s work is included in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Morgan Library, New York; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, among others. Nilsson lives and works in Wilmette, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago with her fellow artist and husband, Jim Nutt.

Hall Art Foundation
544 VT Route 106
Reading, VT 05062
United States
 

For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.