Patti Gilford Fine Arts

Recent Aquisition:

Throughout the past two and a half decades, Olafur Eliasson’s sculptures, installations, paintings, photography, films, and public projects have served as tools for exploring the cognitive and cultural conditions that inform our perception. Ranging from immersive environments of color, light, and movement to installations, his work defies the notion of art as an autonomous object and instead positions itself as part of an exchange with the actively engaged visitor and their individualized experience. Described by the artist as “devices for the experience of reality,” his works and projects prompt a greater sense of awareness about the way we engage with and interpret the world. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy-making, and issues of sustainability and climate change.

Eliasson has been at the center of numerous exhibitions and projects around the world. In 2003, Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale, later that year, he opened The weather project at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The artist’s first retrospective, Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2007 before traveling to the Museum of Modern Art and PS1 in New York; His second retrospective, In real life opened at the Tate Modern, London in 2019 before traveling to the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain in 2020.

Olafur Eliasson
“Pink dewdrop assembly”
2025
Stainless steel, partially silvered glass spheres, paint (pink, black)
26 3/4 x 26 3/4 x 13 inches

Source: https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/27-olafur-eliasson/

Recent Acquisition:

Diane Simpson, born 1935, is a Chicago-based artist who, for the past forty years, has created sculptures and preparatory drawings that evolve from a diverse range of sources, including clothing, utilitarian objects, and architecture. The structures of clothing forms has continuously informed her work, serving as a vehicle for exploring their visually formal qualities, while also revealing their connections to the design and architecture of various cultures and periods in history.

Created from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, most of Simpson’s works on paper have never been exhibited. Deploying various techniques, including collagraphy and collage, the works’ images consist of the same types of forms Simpson would explore over the subsequent five decades: architectural shapes and ideas drawn from women’s clothing. The earliest prints are uncommonly vivid, later ones more subdued, in browns, blue, and grey tones. Made in tiny editions, some in fact unique, these print works allude directly to the artist’s work in three dimensions; one of them was designed to be cut out and folded, resembling an origami sculpture.

Diane Simpson
“Armour Pattern #2”
1975
collagraph print
35 x 30 1/2 inches
edition of 6

Source: https://corbettvsdempsey.com/exhibitions/expo-chicago-2025-diane-simpson/

Recent Aquisition:

Nicola Costantino (1964) was born in Rosario, Argentina. While Costantino has produced a widely varied body of work in multiple mediums, she achieved notoriety for her silicon sculptures and clothes resembling erogenous parts of the human body. Costantino frequently employs visually and conceptually shocking means to investigate corporeality, and the relationship between animals and humans. With a background in sculpture and having worked with her mother in a clothing factory as a child, Costantino constantly seeks to incorporate new materials and processes in her practice. She studied mechanical engineering to make her kinetic works, taxidermy for her casts of animal carcasses, and soap-making to create soap from her own body fat. In her later career, Costantino has turned to photography, exploring themes of doubling and manipulation.

Costantino represented Argentina in the San Pablo Biennial (1998) and was included in the Argentinian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). She has exhibited in museums around the world, including Liverpool (1999), Tel Aviv (2002) and Zurich (2011) and her Corset of Human Furriery is included in the MoMA collection.

Nicola Costantino
“Nipples Soccer Ball (from the series Human Furriery)”
2000
Leather and silicone
9 inches diameter

Source: https://www.artsy.net/artist/nicola-costantino/about

Recent Acquisition:

Benny Andrews was born in Plainview, Georgia. He earned a BFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1958, and soon after moved to New York. He is known for his expressive, figurative paintings that often incorporated collaged fabric and other material.

“New Arrival,” honoring the Harlem Renaissance poet and writer Langston Hughes, is an excellent example of Andrews’ expressive figurative art. It was shown in his solo exhibition at the ACA Gallery the following year. Works from this series are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution.

Andrews wrote about the work: “One of the major themes that Langston Hughes explored in his writings is the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North. “New Arrival” depicts the moment that family members are reunited in Harlem.”

Andrews helped found the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, which advocated for greater representation of African American artists and curators in New York’s major art museums in the late 1960s and 70s. He also led the group in founding an arts education program in prisons and detention centers.

Benny Andrews
(American, 1930 - 2006)
“New Arrival”
1996
Oil and collage of fabric and paper on Waterford paper
22¼ x 30 inches

For the second year in a row, PGFA has been selected as a “Top Art World Professional” by . We are honored to be included!

For the last twenty seven years, PGFA has been building the collection of Clifford Law Offices. We recently published a book, “Chicago Visions”, which highlights the collection and its historical significance. It includes works by George Ames Aldrich, Gertrude Abercrombie, Roger Brown, Paul Kelpe and Charles White.

“The Clifford Collection of Chicago encompasses art produced in the city from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, focusing on the period between 1920 and 1945. The works in the collection represent the major developments in modern and contemporary art, from realism and impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the modernist movements that flourished between 1900 and 1940 to the myriad styles that emerged after World War II.” - Susan Weininger, Professor Emerita, Roosevelt University

The book, edited by Robyn Roslak, includes essays by Susan Weininger and Wendy Greenhouse, PhD, with contributions by Valerie Carberry, John Corbett, Alex Cornacchia, Ed Deluca, Mark Del Vecchio, Susan Klein, Karen Lennox, David Lusenhop, Thomas McCormick, Mark Pascale, Dee Dee Wigmore and Lorri Gunn Wirsum.

Book design by JNL Design.

Cover Image:
J. Jeffrey Grant
“Michigan Avenue (Across the Bridge)”
c. 1934
Oil on canvas
29 1/2 × 25 1/2in

Recent Acquisition:

Julia Thecla, an American Surrealist who lived and worked in Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s, was a well-known character in the city. Easily identified by her odd way of dressing and childlike persona.

Primarily a watercolorist, she made extensive use of fantasy imagery, almost exclusively with the female form. Her work was often described as “jewel-like” or “enchanted”. Like her contemporaries, Ivan Albright and Gertrude Abercrombie, who shared her attitude toward art-making, Thecla made concrete visions of her inner reality.

Thecla’s work was exhibited for the first time in 1931, at the annual International Watercolor Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work began to be shown nationwide in the 1940s, beginning at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1943.

Thecla, influenced by dancer/choreographer Bernice Holmes and her student, Mary Guggenheim, loved ballet. She used the dancers as models for many of her paintings— as seen in Practicing a Bow’s ballerina — and was even commissioned to design both sets and costumes for at least three balletic productions.

Julia Thecla
(American, 1896-1973)
“Practicing a Bow” c. 1941-42
gouache, charcoal and pastel on board
20 x 17 inches

Recent Acquisition:

Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1955, Richard Hull moved to Chicago to study art, receiving his MFA from the School of the Art Institute, in 1979. Soon after he joined the Phyllis Kind Gallery, the primary dealer of many of Chicago’s Imagists artists. Chicago has been his home ever since.

Hull’s work takes the loose-limbed figuration of the Imagist era to a more romantic and painterly place. Repetitive marks reverberate around abstract heads and bulbous hairstyles. Hull considers these figures to be inner mirrors of repetitive thinking and behaviors. Repetition represents temporal rhythms and accumulating variations.

Hull’s oil on wax on linen paintings and crayon on paper drawings are portraits and hairdos, each one expressing a distinct visual personality rather than a legible representation of a specific individual. He calls his over-capacitated, robust, mysterious heads, stolen portraits.

Richard Hull’s paintings, drawings and prints are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The Smart Museum, Chicago.

Richard Hull
“Pressure”
2022
Oil and wax ground on linen
72 x 48 inches

Source: http://westernexhibitions.com/artist/richard-hull/

Recent Aquisition:

As one of the six founding members of Chicago's famous "Hairy Who" art collaborative, Art Green became steeped in surrealism while a student at SAIC. The Hairy Who transformed the art landscape of Chicago, injecting their new and unique voices into the city’s rising national and international profile.

As a part of his artistic practice, Green collected references from illustrated textbooks and advertising of the forties and fifties that touch on technological and roadside Americana. He was attracted to their bold, ironic, and suggestive graphic statements, which he absorbed and reinterpreted in drawings, paintings, and prints.

Green's artwork is full of dichotomies. He combines order and chaos, but every force is balanced and contained. Green juxtaposes images and icons to create a new visual experience that is strange yet familiar, causing the viewer to feel a sense of mystery and nostalgia simultaneously.

Art Green
"Review Preview"
1968
Oil on Canvas
60 x 48 inches

Recent Acquisition:

Born and raised in Barcelona, Selva Aparicio is now based in Chicago. An interdisciplinary artist working across installation and sculpture, her artwork delves into ideas of memory, death, intimacy, and mourning. Inspired by her observations of the cycles of life and death in the natural world, she explores the dissonance that has arisen in the twenty-first century between nature and contemporary life. In her practice, Aparicio pairs evocative materials – such as reclaimed cemetery ephemera, cicada wings, plant seeds, and human hair – with traditional craft techniques – like weaving, carving, and sewing.

Aparicio received the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation’s Artadia Award in 2022. Her 2023 awards include the 3Arts HMS Fund Award and the Burke Prize from the Museum of Arts and Design.

Selva Aparicio
“Absence Remains”
2023
Stone dandelion seeds and found teddy bear
19 x 15 x 15 in

Photo by Jenna Bascom

Recent Acquisition:

Esmaa Mohamoud’s work examines the gap between contemporary culture's simplistic view of Black people and the rich complexity and diversity of their actual lived experiences. This sculpture is an intricate, masterful bust of a young African girl, carved from shea butter. The bust sits atop a plinth of black Italian marble. At its foot is a pile of shoe butter “shea nuts,” made from hand whittled casts of real Ghanaian shea nuts. The bust is an expression of beauty, intense labor, and objectification, an eloquent commentary on the shea butter industry itself.

Shea butter, among Africa’s largest exports, is used extensively in common beauty products. While the companies that utilize this raw material make exorbitant profits, the young African women who harvest the nuts are ruthlessly exploited, working long hours and making only a meager living.

Esmaa Mohamoud
“Ebony in Ivory, I”
2022
Shea Butter, Italian black marble, wax, damar resin
60 x 30 x 30 in (installed)
Unique Edition 3 of 5 (+1AP)

Source: https://kavigupta.com/artists/101-esmaa-mohamoud/

Recent Acquisition:
"I think of life as a unity. This includes mountains, mice, rocks, trees, women, and men. It's all one big lump of clay."
—Ruth Duckworth

Ruth Duckworth resisted the division between art and craft, choosing to work sculpturally in clay rather than create utilitarian objects. Inspired by the natural world—weather, biology, land, the cosmos—she reduced forms to their essence. Considered one of the foremost modernist sculptors, Duckworth exhibited widely and received many honors. She lived in Chicago for 45 years until her death at the age of 90.

Ruth Duckworth
“Untitled”
1989
Porcelain
14.75 x 5.25 x 2.75
Private collector