Jimmy Wright Radiant: an Overview 1963-2004

Press Release

Paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints by one of the unsung early Chicago imagists, Jimmy Wright, now a renowned New York artist, spotlighting his rarely seen work from the ’60s and early ’70s. This exhibition of nearly 50 pieces will include many never-exhibited works on paper from Wright’s period in Chicago (the majority of which was destroyed in a catastrophic fire in the early ’70s), including two Maxwell Street etchings from 1966 (a copy of one of which hangs in the Roger Brown Study Collection), as well as his bronze and ceramic sculptures from the same period. Close friend of Philip Hanson and Roger Brown, Wright studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1964-1968. Wright’s uncommonly rich graphite drawings and enormous acrylic paintings from his several subsequent years downstate in Carbondale, Illinois, will also be on exhibit, as will a number of his large cityscape paintings of New York, painted just as he moved there in 1974, and a collection of his wickedly funny homoerotic baptism paintings and other scenes mixing eroticism and religion. One large sunflower painting completed this year will bring the show forward to Wright’s present work, which has been hailed by The New Yorker as “…van Gogh on acid.”