Karl Wirsum

Karl Wirsum was born in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois. As a child he took free Saturday art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, an experience he later credited as his earliest training. He enrolled on scholarship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957 and earned his BFA in 1961.

In 1966, Wirsum joined Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Suellen Rocca to form The Hairy Who, a Chicago exhibiting group whose exuberant, cartoon-derived imagery ran through 1969 and helped define the loose movement later labeled Chicago Imagism. His work was included in the 1968 Whitney Annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He briefly taught in Sacramento in the early 1970s before returning to Chicago, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, continuing to exhibit widely in the United States and abroad. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2016.

Wirsum died on May 6, 2021, at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in the Lake View neighborhood of Chicago. According to his family and his gallery, Derek Eller Gallery, the cause was cardiac arrest. He was 81.

Wirsum is consistently framed as a central figure of Chicago Imagism and one of the most visually distinctive members of The Hairy Who, known for fusing comic books, toys, and non-Western and folk art references into bold, tightly outlined figuration. Auction Daily's profile of the artist describes his paintings as "wacky, irreverent," and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum both situate him among the Hairy Who's founding figures. That reading, of Wirsum as a serious formal inventor working through a deliberately playful vocabulary, has held steady from his 1960s Hairy Who years through his 2021 obituaries and into recent institutional survey shows.

Wirsum's auction market is small but has produced strong results for his major paintings. His all-time auction record is Doggerel III, an acrylic on canvas from 1967, which sold for USD 212,500 at Hindman's Post War and Contemporary Art sale in Chicago in September 2019, more than triple its high estimate and described by the house as a global record for the artist. That result followed an earlier record set at Christie's in 2015. Outside of his handful of major paintings, prints and works on paper by Wirsum have traded at far lower levels, typically in the low thousands of dollars. His work is currently handled through Derek Eller Gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, and Matthew Marks Gallery.

Wirsum has no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through his representing galleries carry extra weight. His auction history is thin: a single six-figure painting result anchors the top of the market, while most works on paper trade far below that level, so any one sale should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable benchmark. His museum profile, anchored by the Whitney, MoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, plus renewed gallery and museum attention since 2024, is the strongest signal of long-term durability for a market that remains small in volume.