William Conger

William Conger (born 1937) is a Chicago-based, American painter and educator, known for a dynamic, subjective style of abstraction descended from Kandinsky, which consciously employs illogical, illusionistic space and light and ambiguous forms that evoke metaphorical associations.

After an erratic high school career, he enrolled there in 1954, but transferred to the University of New Mexico (UNM) in 1957, to set out on his own.

At UNM, Conger studied under Raymond Jonson—founder of the Transcendental Painting Group—Elaine de Kooning, and sculptor Robert Mallary.

Jonson and de Kooning were key influences, as were the romantic southwestern landscape and imagery, including Native American pottery.

After earning a BFA in 1960, Conger returned to Chicago, painted in a shared studio with artist Robert Lewis, and found advertising work with Montgomery Ward and Skil Power Tools.

Secondly, minimalism—represented by the ideas of Clement Greenberg and work of Frank Stella—dominated post-1960s abstraction.

Characterized by formal regularity, geometricity, flat space and non-referentiality, minimalism had, in Kuspit's words, purged the subjective roots of abstraction and reduced it "to an emotional vacuum uninhabited by any self."

Conger resisted.

Although an abstractionist, he felt a personal kinship with the Imagists, and little affinity for the limiting strictures of Greenbergian minimalism.

His blend of ambiguous forms and atmosphere, oblique referentiality, and metaphorical allusions to art, history and geography occupied a unique place where abstraction and representation coalesced, bridging the groups.

Key shows he was in include: AIC's "Chicago and Vicinity" surveys (several, 1963–1985), the MCA's "Abstract Art in Chicago" (1976) and "Art in Chicago 1945-95" (1996–7), "Chicago, Some Other Traditions" (traveling, 1983–6), and "The Chicago Connection" (traveling, 1976–7).

Conger continues to work and live in Chicago, with his wife Kathleen.

They have two daughters, Sarah and Clarisa, and five grandchildren.

Conger's work is rooted in the figural abstraction of artists like Kandinsky, Klee, Miró, and pre-war Americans Jonson and Arthur Dove.

Features that unite him to this more solitary, symbolic tradition are his illusionistic space, mix of organic and geometric forms, and openness to reference beyond the canvas.

John Brunetti wrote that Conger's fluid, "muscular language" refined the formal grammars of Cubism and Surrealism to incorporate intuitive expression of feelings, memories and engagement, often informed by his native Chicago.

He soon met his future wife, Kathleen—they married in 1964—and returned to school to pursue art full time, choosing the University of Chicago.

He studied with professor Seymour Rosofsky, returned to figurative work for a time, and earned an MFA in 1966.

After graduating, Conger began a distinguished education career, initially at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Illinois, and later as professor and chair of art departments at DePaul University and Northwestern University.

He exhibited steadily in the Midwest and in solo shows at the Douglas Kenyon (1974–6), Zaks (1978–1983), and Roy Boyd (1985–2012) galleries in Chicago.

He has since been represented by Zolla/Lieberman (Chicago) and Bruno David (St. Louis).

As early as 1976, Conger labeled his paintings "metaphors of experience and feeling... the mind as nature."

Critic Saul Ostrow described Conger's method as "fluctuating between the rational, the associative, and the subjective."

Although non-representational, his work connects to the everyday world through signifiers and titles he lets emerge during the painting process, which evoke what he calls "'as if' places and stories" without depicting any specific one.

He does so based on his contention that abstract work can never be completely non-referential—that intentionally or not, all art generates meaning beyond itself.

For Donald Kuspit, the process yields an aesthetically resonant, "spontaneous means of introspection, even self-analysis" that invites psychological unpacking.

In Chicago, however, all of this placed Conger on the "wrong" side of two largely critic-fueled battles.

First, local identification with the increasingly famous, representational Chicago Imagists often relegated abstract work to comparative obscurity.

He is a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters self-named in 1981, whose paradoxical styles countered the reductive minimalism that dominated post-1960s art.

With like-minded, but visually diverse Chicago painters Miyoko Ito, Richard Loving and Frank Piatek, Conger formed the informal "Allusive Abstractionists" in 1981, to spark dialogue and make space for a wider conception of abstraction.

In 1982, critic Mary Mathews Gedo hailed them as "prescient prophets of the new style of abstraction" that flowered in the 1980s.

In his essay for Conger's fifty-year career retrospective, Donald Kuspit called Conger art-historically daring for forging a path of subjective abstraction after minimalism had allegedly purged painting of an inner life.

Despite being abstract, his work has a strong connection to Chicago's urban, lakeside geography and displays idiosyncratic variations of tendencies identified with Chicago Imagist art.

A hallmark of Conger's career has been his enduring capacity for improvisation and discovery within self-prescribed stylistic limits.

Conger has shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), the Krannert Art Museum, and Jonson Museum, and in numerous solo exhibitions in Chicago and beyond.

His work has been discussed in national publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, and ARTnews, and major dailies including the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

He has been recognized by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, City of Chicago Public Commissions, inclusion in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and purchases by public and private collections.

In addition to his art career, Conger has taught and chaired art departments at DePaul University and Northwestern University, and written about art.

William Conger was born in Dixon, Illinois and raised in Evanston and Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood.

He was exposed to art early in life, including trips with his mother, an amateur painter, to the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) and studies at its junior school.