Karl Wirsum

Review of Karl Wirsum at Derek Eller Gallery in September of 2010 as published in Artillery Magazine.

Karl Wirsum’s show “Drawings: 1967 – 1970) at Derek Eller Gallery, is his first solo show in New York in 20 years and, judging by the evidence on hand here, this has been an aggregious over-sight. Maybe not a surprising one, though – Wirsum’s career – like that of the other members of the group of Chicago Imagists known as “The Hairy Who?”, was built on a certain indifference to the supposed cultural elite, in particular the supposed importance of New York as a cultural capital. As it turns out, though, we obviously need artists like Wirsum more than they need us.

At their most basic level, the drawings in this show resemble, very superficially, what happens when kids try to learn to draw by copying superheroes out of comic books without understanding how the patterns of light and dark and over-lapping contours are supposed to create volumetric form. This is usually a liability but by employing this technique deliberately – not unlike how Lichtenstein revealed the abstract qualities of comic book panels merely by blowing them up to epic proportions – Wirsum finds an opportunity here.

One of my favorite drawings in this show was a black, yellow, and orange drawing of a cow-girl twirling a lasso. It feels like something that could be a strip club neon sign straight out of Las Vegas but it’s somehow more mysterious. There’s a totemic quality about it as if the buxom cow-girl has been elevated to some sort of mythological status while the crummy aesthetics and lurid materialism of the source material has been identified as grotesque and roundly rejected. Another drawing here of a red-head in a pin-up pose (all of the ddrawings here are figures of some sort) seems to simultaneously mock and re-invent its source. The hair is treated as a flat abstract firy red shape interspersed with lightning-like white hightlights while the body looks unfinished, defined only in contour, with a face and arms filled in with lines that suggest razor-wire as readily as lip-stick.

Other works include a pair of sexy legs with a black helmet shaped skirt and the caption, “Nazi helmet skirt”, and a few drawings of what might be native women appropriated from old National Geographic’s, and a standing figure with a frogs face and a vibrating body of abstract psychedelic doodles that reminds me of the phrase “like being inside of an Aztec pinball machine” which the comedian Marc Maron once used to describe what it was like to close his eyes while under the influence of some very intense mushrooms. In all of these works Wirsum is taking familiar types and motifs and rendering them strange alien, totally abstract, and precisely differentiated. Characters, images, areas of abstract decoration, or stylistic choices, sometimes seem to reoccur but never exactly the same way twice. Despite – rather, probably, because of – his drawings loose funky attitudes, it’s immediately clear that they are products of sophisticated visual thinking in which multiple ends are always approached simultaneously, and a semi-improvisational process in which every line seems to be part of a process of discovery.