Ellen Lanyon: Curiosities, Trout

About the artist

Ellen Lanyon was a painter and printmaker from Chicago who studied at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and the Courtauld, London.   Her work is widely characterised as surreal and has a dreamlike quality, featuring animal, mechanical and floral motifs in complex compositions.  “A Chicago critic was not handing out compliments when he called her ‘your basic Corn Belt Surrealist,'” critic Lucy Lippard wrote in a May 1983 , “but in fact the dry touch of regionalism is a unique and important part of Lanyon’s art. She is a rare and peculiarly American breed—an honest, accessible, visionary artist, not unaware of, but resolutely independent of the imposed mainstreams of fashion.”  Lanyon was a professor of painting at several institutions including the Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts, both in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Over the course of her career, Lanyon had over 75 solo exhibitions, including 11 museum exhibitions, three of which were major traveling retrospectives. “Ellen Lanyon, Strange Games: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective” (1987-88) originated at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Public collections include: Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Ellen and Kip first started to collaborate in the late 1990s going on to produce the ‘Curiosities’ series in 2014 from which the work included is drawn.