Drawn from the permanent collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The Singing Bird Room of Robert Lostutter surveys the work of one of the leading Chicago artists of recent decades. The exhibition, which includes more than thirty watercolors, drawings, prints, and oil paintings, will be on view in the State Street Gallery of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art from October 5, 2012, to January 6, 2013.

Works in the exhibition date from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, and are drawn from the Bill McClain Collection of Chicago Imagism, an exceptional private collection that was made available to MMoCA approximately three years ago. Lostutter shared the Imagists’ interests in a figurative art of vibrant color and graphic line based on personal fantasy.

In the early 1970s, a sojourn in Mexico and his love of nature led Robert Lostutter to seize upon a theme that came to define his mature style. A superb draftsman and watercolorist, he began making portraits of male figures adorned with the plumage of tropical birds or the petals and leaves of orchids. Lostutter’s mythic creatures are both disturbing and radiantly beautiful, fusions of animal and human, nature and culture.

The Singing Bird Room of Robert Lostutter is accompanied by a fully illustrated 60-page catalog, which is funded, in part, through a generous contribution from Mark and Judy Bednar.

The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art will be closed December 24, 25, and 31, as well as January 1.