Corbett vs. Dempsey

works by Jim Lutes

Jim Lutes was born in Fort Lewis, Washinton. He attended Washington State University, Pullman, as an undergraduate. Drawn in part by the presence of the Imagists, he came to Chicago in 1980, receiving his MFA in 1982 from SAIC, where Ray Yoshida, Barbara Rossi, Christina Ramberg, and Suellen Rocca were teaching.

Lutes first gained national attention for his representational works which comment critically on popular and consumer culture. In paintings often described as "gritty" or "obsessive," the artist depicted, in an expressive, distorted figurative style, the streets of his crumbling Milwaukee Avenue neighborhood in Chicago; his studio filled with beer cans and overflowing ashtrays; his own morose flesh facing yet another trial - hangover, illness, sloth, depression. Inventive portraits, self-portraits, and cityscapes, many showing several different time-frames, explore the frustrations plaguing himself and others in a society flooded with meaningless, mass-produced consumer items. Human frailties, both physical and psychological, are shown in scathingly honest depictions - depression, ill health, sexual frustration, and obesity are provocative and disturbing subjects. Lutes achieved early success; his paintings were often described in catalogues and reviews as being in a lineage with the Imagist tradition of distorted figuration.

In the mid-1980s, Lutes's paintings evolved into a more abstracted style that shows his increasing virtuosity with his medium. Swirls of color layer the canvas within larger, biomorphic forms that seem eerie remnants of figures. Yet even as the paintings became more abstract, recognizable images remained, typically embedded within matrices of abstract forms or floating within a maze of line and color. Indeed, each painting is structured around an underlying image that emotionally or psychologically inspired the work.

Lutes has shown at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1985); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1987): Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1993); and locally at the Terra Museum of American Art (1987) , the State of Illinois Art Gallery (1989 and 1991), and the MCA (1989 and 1994). In 1993 he exhibited in Germany's prestigious "Documenta" in Kassel. He received a Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, "Awards in the Visual Arts" grant in 1988.

Biography by Lynne Warren, from Art in Chicago 1945 - 1995