Robert Lostutter

Lostutter is associated with the Chicago Imagists, figurative artists who have been working in a surrealist vein since the late 1960s. His works often depict grotesque figures that merge humans, birds, and plants into fantastical hybrids. In 2021, Lostutter created a series of 19 drawings called "The Songs of War," showing a range of monstrous creatures inspired by the horrors of war. The present work is a watercolor version of one of these drawings (2021.28:16). The highly meticulous rendering is characteristic of Lostutter's style, in which otherworldly subjects are made all the more strange by the refinement of his technique.