There is a riot of colour at the heart of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford as the third exhibition arranged between the Hall Art Foundation and the Ashmolean Museum brings the art of Ed Paschke to the UK in the exhibition  Ed Paschke: Visionary from Chicago, 1968 – 2004.

The Hall Foundation, founded in 2007, supports exhibitions of postwar and contemporary art and has its primary exhibition space in Vermont, USA.  It has partnerships with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, Massachusetts and also with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where it is presenting a series of exhibitions curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal. The current exhibition also includes work borrowed from the Ed Paschke Foundation and the artist Jeff Koons.

Paschke (1968 -2004), part of a group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists, was influenced by media imagery and popular culture, but his work is more colourful and has a dark undercurrent in contrast to his contemporaries, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg, perhaps with synergies to the jazz culture of the south side of Chicago.

‘Chicago and the American Midwest have an extraordinary and very different visual art culture that established itself after the positive reception there of surrealism and the work of artists such as Dalí, Magritte, Delvaux and Matta. Unlike the New York City and Los Angeles art scenes, this world is little known in Great Britain. Ed Paschke is one of Chicago’s most significant artists, and this exhibition, the first of Paschke’s work in the United Kingdom, should come as a revelation.’ (Sir Norman Rosenthal).

Photographs from The Hall Foundation