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Lot Essay
Each a phantasma of luminous colour, the following two paintings exemplify Ed Paschke's Surrealist practice, which was rooted in Chicago, the city where he was born and where he spent most his life. After receiving a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961, he was conscripted into the US Army, and upon his return, he worked as a professional illustrator; throughout his career his painting practice retained clear evidence of this graphic sensibility. In the late 1960s, Paschke returned to the Art Institute to study for an MFA and while there, he met the artists who would become associated with Chicago Imagism; together, they set the city’s art scene ablaze. These vibrant interpretations of pop culture imagery were an important influence on the fledgling career of Jeff Koons, who worked as Paschke’s assistant after moving to Chicago to study at the School of the Art Institute; like his mentor Koons too exhibits a fascination with rendering the everyday strange.
Drawing from vernacular media and pop culture, Imagists’ works were characterised by bright, fierce colours and distorted figures, forming a visceral visual idiom ‘united by humour and fondness for the regular messiness of life’ (R. Cooper, ‘Who? How? What?’, in Chicago Imagists 1960s-1970s, exh. cat., Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, 2019, p. 29). Such chromatic intensity can be seen in the Day-Glo greens, pinks and oranges of Paschke’s Vinaigrette, 1988, and Siamese, 1992. If the double masks of Vinaigrette are ethereal and almost wraithlike, then Siamese is a flashier stencilling of disembodied stilettos partially superimposed over a Dada-esque face. Bathed in nocturne’s fluorescent halos, both depict figures who seem plucked from a fantastical realm. Paschke was drawn to images and figures associated with the entertainment industry – both its culturally sanctioned celebrities as well as the more peripheral figures – and both Vinaigrette and Siamese conjure back alley Hollywood filtered through his hometown. Using clippings pulled from Chicago’s newspapers and tabloids, Paschke’s practice evokes ‘the life of the city’ (N. Boobis, ‘Ed Paschke’, in Chicago Imagists 1960s-1970s, exh. cat., Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, 2019, p. 91). Paschke painted his world, a city set aglow by the night’s neon lights and famous characters.
Drawing from vernacular media and pop culture, Imagists’ works were characterised by bright, fierce colours and distorted figures, forming a visceral visual idiom ‘united by humour and fondness for the regular messiness of life’ (R. Cooper, ‘Who? How? What?’, in Chicago Imagists 1960s-1970s, exh. cat., Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, 2019, p. 29). Such chromatic intensity can be seen in the Day-Glo greens, pinks and oranges of Paschke’s Vinaigrette, 1988, and Siamese, 1992. If the double masks of Vinaigrette are ethereal and almost wraithlike, then Siamese is a flashier stencilling of disembodied stilettos partially superimposed over a Dada-esque face. Bathed in nocturne’s fluorescent halos, both depict figures who seem plucked from a fantastical realm. Paschke was drawn to images and figures associated with the entertainment industry – both its culturally sanctioned celebrities as well as the more peripheral figures – and both Vinaigrette and Siamese conjure back alley Hollywood filtered through his hometown. Using clippings pulled from Chicago’s newspapers and tabloids, Paschke’s practice evokes ‘the life of the city’ (N. Boobis, ‘Ed Paschke’, in Chicago Imagists 1960s-1970s, exh. cat., Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, 2019, p. 91). Paschke painted his world, a city set aglow by the night’s neon lights and famous characters.