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Ed Paschke
1939–2004
Death placeChicago, Illinois, United States of America
BirthplaceChicago, Illinois, United States of America
BiographyBorn in Chicago in 1939, Ed Paschke studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned a BFA in 1961 and an MFA in 1970. He worked as a commercial artist and experimented with collage and film throughout the 1960s. During a brief period in New York, he was exposed to Pop Art and began to incorporate images borrowed directly from popular print media. Paschke's interest in cartoons, animation, poster and tattoo art provided diverse source material for his colorful, playful, and multivalent imagery. Predisposed to life on the social fringe, Paschke drew on his experiences in the sleazy nightclubs of Chicago and New York, making their subcultures the subject of his Pop-informed art. Utilizing overhead projectors to compose his pictures, Paschke carefully recreated the look and feel of various media and often manipulated his source materials—for example, adding a woman's face to the body of a doll, as seen in Top Cat Boy--to layer his canvases with a multitude of textures and evocative surface effects. Garish, flamboyant, and at times futuristic, Paschke's imagery of the 1970s traffics in the chunky, distended forms and glitter of the period aesthetic known as Glam.
In 1968 Paschke began exhibiting alongside artists such as Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Barbara Rossi, among others, whose work shared references to non-Western and surrealist art, appropriated images from popular culture, and employed brilliant color in carefully worked surfaces. Collectively known as the Imagists, they showed in a sequence of important Chicago exhibitions whose names, according to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, might have been monikers of psychedelic rock bands: The Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, The False Image, and Marriage Chicago Style. Paschke taught at several area colleges and at the School of the Art Institute before becoming a full-time professor of art at Northwestern University in 1978, where he taught for over twenty-six years until his death in 2004. His work has been collected by major institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among many others.
In 1968 Paschke began exhibiting alongside artists such as Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Barbara Rossi, among others, whose work shared references to non-Western and surrealist art, appropriated images from popular culture, and employed brilliant color in carefully worked surfaces. Collectively known as the Imagists, they showed in a sequence of important Chicago exhibitions whose names, according to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, might have been monikers of psychedelic rock bands: The Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, The False Image, and Marriage Chicago Style. Paschke taught at several area colleges and at the School of the Art Institute before becoming a full-time professor of art at Northwestern University in 1978, where he taught for over twenty-six years until his death in 2004. His work has been collected by major institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among many others.