Ellen Lanyon

The artist Ellen Lanyon has been an icon of the Chicago school for over 60 years, painting in a way that harkens to both formalism and the realms of dreams and symbolism. Her early interest in metaphysical imagery, with other artists such as Robert Barnes, June Leaf, James McGarrel, and Irving Petlin, helped lead her to, as the artist says, "the eccentric ribbons of the subconscious." These ribbons involve the most fanciful of still lifes one could ever imagine: the replication of intricate objects, like a small majolica humidor in the shape of a frog smoking a pipe that first belonged to her Grandfather, and the incorporation of nature, fish and fowl, in fantastical settings. Lanyon says that she felt she was a magician through her paintings, one "who can transform flowers into fire, create the animate out of the inanimate, and utilize osmosis and gravity to create illusion." And she does, through items of nostalgia, rich color pallets, and dream-like scenarios that bring her scenes to life.

Lanyon has had over seventy-five solo exhibitions and three major traveling retrospectives. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Walker Art Center, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum, among others.