Sally Slips Bye-Bye

Influenced by the aesthetics of comic books, advertisements, cinema, folk art, and Surrealism, Jim Nutt’s darkly humorous, sometimes violent work presents an emphatically vernacular, unconventionally sensuous, and often explicitly sexual vision of the human figure. Nutt was a key member of the Hairy Who, a small group of Art Institute–trained artists who exhibited together at the Hyde Park Art Center in the mid- to late 1960s. He first painted on the back of Plexiglas—a material he became enamored with while playing pinball and observing painted ads in storefront windows. By the 1970s, he abandoned this painstaking process and began to work on canvas. Sally Slips Bye-Bye captures the spontaneous line, love of caricature, and high wit at the root of his practice. It also exemplifies a major body of work, in which Nutt expanded the narrative potential of his pictures by juxtaposing fragmented vignettes with a central, highly stylized figure.