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FOR A BOOKLET published on the occasion of the third Hairy Who exhibition in Chicago, in 1968, Karl Wirsum drew a woman whose head has been replaced by a mandala not a groovy meditative symbol but a pulsating, agitated, electrified pattern vibrating in red, blue, yellow, and green. This must have been what the inside of Wirsum’s mind looked like: protean and always switched on. For sixty years from his graduation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961, through his association with the Hairy Who in the mid to late ’60s, and right up to his death on May 6 Wirsum produced a legion
Karl Wirsum
The Chicago-born artist Karl Wirsum, a member of the legendary Hairy Who art group, died on 6 May, aged 81. Spending most of his career in the Windy City, Wirsum became a beloved artist and professor of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, as evidenced by the outpouring of appreciation on social media from scores of former students and fans. “Karl was an artist of major consequence,” says James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago. “His visionary, imaginative, utterly original take on figuration both epitomized a Chicago school and registered in a national and international consciousness.”
Sun-Times file
Karl Wirsum first began drawing when he was 5 and stuck for weeks in a hospital room, recovering from a fractured skull.
And he never stopped not even after he’d had several strokes and could barely move his hand.
“Even if it was just wiggly marks and circles and little angles on paper,” said his wife of 53 years, Lorri Gunn Wirsum. “He did it every day. He looked out our back window at an apple tree, and all through the winter with the tree skeletal, he just would draw the branches – his version of it.”
Mr. Wirsum – who gained fame locally and nationally during the 1960s for his witty, entirely original and meticulous exploration of the human form – died Thursday at Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Lake View, his wife said. He was 81. He’d lived almost all of his life in the city.
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