"Everything's Here"

Jeff Koons spent a year in Chicago (1975–76) as a visiting student at the School of the Art Institute. “Everything’s Here,” a companion show to Koons’s MCA retrospective, gathers work by the Chicago artists whom he admired during his stay.

At the time, Chicago art was dominated by the Imagists, a group of painters committed to figurative imagery who are still celebrated for rejecting the mainstream Abstraction and Conceptualism emerging from New York. Koons worked in the studios of both Ed Paschke and Jim Nutt, two of the movement’s most important figures. This exhibition features Paschke, Nutt and the other usual Imagist suspects: Roger Brown, Karl Wirsum, Christina Ramberg and H.C. Westermann. There’s also a fine selection of ephemera documenting the art scene at the time, including little-seen exhibition posters donated to the MCA by artists Roland Ginzel and Ellen Lanyon.

“Everything’s Here” offers profound insight into the Chicago art world as Koons experienced it. The Imagists’ personal iconography and rebellious spirit can be linked to Koons, who has cited some of the pieces here, such as Westermann’s print Dance of Death and Paschke’s Red Sweeney, as specific influences. Rare items, such as Brown’s 3-D painting of a building (which could be worn as a mask), Wirsum’s unusually shaped painting Split-Beaver Broad and an oil by watercolorist Robert Lostutter, will surprise even connoisseurs. They more than justify this excuse to display the MCA’s stellar stash of Chicago art.