Ed Paschke

Born 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 paint images borrowed from popular print media. Paschke's interest in cartoons, animation, poster and tattoo art provided diverse source material for his colorful imagery that often confronts social values. Attracted to the nightclubs of Chicago and New York, Paschke embraced their subcultures as 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 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 (b. 1940), Jim Nutt (b. 1938), and Barbara Rossi (1940-2023), among others, who found inspiration in 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 series of important Chicago exhibitions, including The Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, The False Image, and Marriage Chicago Style. Paschke soon separated himself from this group of artists to work independently. He 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.