ARS LIBRI 12

March 5 - May 2 2010

Robert Lostutter

Robert Lostutter attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and became influenced by John Rogers Cox, an academic painter who stressed traditional drawing and painting techniques. While there, he became associated with a group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists. This group's work tended towards incredibly intricate, detailed, surreal images full of whimsy and psychological tension. Following a trip to Mexico in the 1970's, Lostutter began a project that would come to dominate his artistic production -- making drawings and paintings of strange hybrid bird-men with exotic, multicolored plumage fused into their faces and beaks and leaves growing from their bodies. Critics and others have speculated that these strange creatures represent a metamorphosis of the human being into an eroticized ornithological world of sub-surface sexuality.

Lostutter is an artist who’s career is characterized as having had a long and steady focus, but who remains strangely unknown outside of a small group of curators, collectors and artists familiar with him in the context of the Chicago community. This exhibition seeks to give a slight glimpse of his work to what is likely an unfamiliar audience in the greater Boston area.