Wright Auction

In the intervening decade between Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Mr. Big Arms in a No Swipe Place, Wirsum moved toward portraiture of this sort, with complete figures shown directly. In a Hyperallergic Q&A on October 10, 2015 with Nicole Rudick, Wirsum discussed some of the disparate inspirations that informed his portraits:

“It’s definitely form. Just look at the physiognomy. I mentioned Medieval works with Christ and the torso view—they’re often elaborate and a little strange. They made reference to anatomy, but it’s not photographically rendered. That’s what I do—I think about what part of the body it is and how I can make some association to it but bring a strong abstraction. I also think about Mesoamerican work, the ravens and all these bird forms on ceramics. They’re very stylized.

“I was really inspired by the Mesoamericans and their very graphic stylization. When I got out of the Art Institute, I spent five months in Mexico, and that was really influential. I became immersed in Mesoamerican art, the Day of the Dead festivals. The storefronts, the buses—everything had imagery. It was great. I could see it connecting up to comic art, the exaggeration of physical form. In Dick Tracy, for example, Chester Gould was dealing with a certain reality, but he exaggerated their physical nature, especially the criminal types. Just think about meeting some of these characters in the street!”

Wirsum’s Q&A with Hyperallergic came toward the end of his fourth of six solo exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery in New York City, entitled Karl Wirsum, The Hard Way: Selections from the 1970s (September 10 – October 17, 2015), which was organized with renowned curator, Dan Nadel. Once Wirsum came back to Chicago after living in Sacramento with his family for two years in 1973, he gradually embraced the complete human form, albeit wildly altered according to his whims, which Nadel explained in the exhibition’s press release:

“Upon his return to Chicago, Wirsum continued his explorations of the possibilities of bodily distortions, completing a series of paintings and drawings of ice skaters possessed of bulbous appendages imagined by Wirsum to be the result of athletic activity focused solely on the lower half of the body. Those bodies were then matched by the artist’s facial investigations. Wirsum’s Marcel Dude-Champ is a hanging sign of stacked heads inspired by Man Ray’s 1924 series of photos of Duchamp in various states of lathered disguise. As though offering models for his salon, Wirsum altered six Styrofoam wig forms, investing anonymous heads with individual personalities by giving each distinctive facial features. Finally, as the decade wound down, Wirsum circled back to his Chicago roots, completing a suite of drawings and prints entitled How To Draw Dick Tracy the Hard Way. Dick Tracy and his creator, Chester Gould, being primary inspirations for Wirsum, as well as Chicago icons. The ‘hard way’ here, is straight-on portraiture—Tracy was nearly always shown in profile, so Wirsum abstracted the character, expanding the geometry of his design, and, as he had with so many other symbols and objects around him in the 1970s, making it entirely his own.”

Therefore, Mr. Big Arms in a No Swipe Place may be viewed as a mature example of Wirsum masterfully leveraging a host of sources to put the past in conversation with the present in order to define portraiture on his own fantastic, even zany, yet nonetheless sublime terms. At once nostalgic and futuristic, by turns playful and intense, this important Wirsum painting is an essential part of the artist’s evolution in transporting recognizable human figures into an alternate, technicolor dimension.