Jim Nutt: Shouldn’t We Be More Careful?
6 September – 21 October 2023
David Nolan Gallery
24 East 81 Street, New York

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of 19 recent drawings by Jim Nutt (b. 1938, Pittsfield, Massachusetts; BFA 1967, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), marking the artist’s first show of new work in over a decade. Organized in close collaboration with Nutt, the exhibition showcases the four-decade stylistic culmination of his richly referential, subtly sinister ‘imaginary women’ portraits. The exhibition’s drawings were created between 2022 and 2023.

Titled after a 1977 Nutt painting, Shouldn’t We Be More Careful? showcases the final maturation of Nutt’s famed, four-decade ‘imaginary women’ painting and drawing series, his delicately grotesque portraits now masterfully distilled to their most essential forms with precise, efficient linework

A founding member of the 1960s Chicago Imagists (and constituent surrealist group ‘The Hairy Who’), Nutt irreverently rejected the New York art establishment. In his early work, provocative subject matter that oscillated between the slapstick, grotesque, sinister, and psychosexual was rendered with exquisite technical execution, cunning art-historical references, and highly evident formal training. The work quickly garnered global institutional acclaim, including a 1974 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1987, Nutt began his ‘imaginary women’ series, which culminates in the new exhibition.

Although Nutt’s name remains indelibly linked with “The Hairy Who” (and the group’s perverse, humorous, and psychosexual approach to surrealism), his work over the past four decades has had an almost singular focus on the ‘imaginary woman’ portrait. Each figure is fully fictional; Nutt compares his process to that of a writer, starting with the suggestion of a personality and evolving it into something more specific through the act of mark-making. Within the visual language he has created for the series, each eyebrow is often conveyed with a stark line, a closed arc, or a squiggle; noses tend to be ogre-like or cartoon-esque, connected by teardrop-shaped outlines to lips made up of just three lines. Reflected in the sum of each new portrait’s parts is the refined manifestation of the characteristic absurdity that has distinguished Nutt’s practice since the 1960s.