Jim Lutes: Paintings & Drawings from 1995 - 2008

February 19 - April 14, 2008

University Galleries is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jim Lutes, comprising works made between 1995 and 2008. 

Lutes’ paintings since the mid-1990s intertwine representational elements and abstract markings: images of landscapes, interiors, and figures are overlaid with abstracted networks of painterly swirls or cartoonish blobs which at times all but obscure the painting underneath. Self-referential portraiture and media-derived imagery are subsumed into an intense, ongoing exploration of painterly technique amalgamating acrylics, egg tempera, oils and encaustic in various combinations. Critic David Pagel has described Lutes’ work paradoxically as the “netherworld between intention and accident, spontaneity and formula.”  

Lutes is a Professor of Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Illinois State University from 1995-1999. He has exhibited extensively in Chicago; New York; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Brussels, Belgium and Kassel, Germany. His work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, the Corcoran Biennial, and Documenta IX, as well as solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago. This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. 

A monograph with an essay by Terry Myers will accompany the exhibition