Hollis Sigler

Hollis Sigler was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1948 and died in 2001. In 1970 she graduated from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, where she studied figure drawing and worked in an Abstract Expressionist mode. While studying at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1971-73 she became exposed to the power of untrained, visionary artists and to the city's dominant movement, the Chicago Imagists, who were influenced by comic books, carnival imagery, and outsider art. At the same time, she was affected by feminism's validation of personal and emotional content in art. After earning her M.F.A. in 1973, she continued to work in a realist style until she turned to drawing, which inspired a new "faux-naive" style ideally suited to her inner aesthetic impulses. Since her first exhibition of drawings in 1977 at the Nancy Lurie Gallery in Chicago, her work has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, Switzerland, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and can be found in collections worldwide. Her narratives are personal and collective metaphors for devastation and hope. Enhanced by hand-written titles, her haunting, otherworldly images of largely unpopulated domestic interiors and fanciful landscapes disarm the viewer with their high-keyed palette, expressionist gesture, and skewed perspectives.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.