Statsinger depicted her experiences of the natural world through drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Her early drawings, characterized by clean lines, all-over patterns, and fantastical figures drew the interest of art world luminaries and museum curators including Mies Van Der Rohe, the then director of the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Katharine Kuh and Carl Schniewind, both curators from the Art Institute of Chicago. The early support of such influential figures led to solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952 and 1957 and her inclusion in a 1954 group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Statsinger and her practice remained inquisitively open to the cultural and natural influences in her surroundings. While studying with artist and historian Kathleen Blackshear at the Art Institute, she was exposed to makers from the non-western canon. Later, on several extended trips to Japan, Statsinger further developed her perspective on the world and the environment in ways that would ripple throughout the duration of her career. “It is extremely difficult to pinpoint influences," Statsinger explained in a letter to Smithsonian curator Harry Rand in 1980. "I’ve lived in many places including Mexico and Japan and camped all over the great western part of our country. Nature in some way has been a consistent influence. Being an artist is just a way of being alive to the world and a wonderful way of communicating that being.”[i] 

In her mature work, Statsinger relinquished readily identifiable forms in favor of immersive, otherworldly compositions and complex forms abstracted from what she saw in nature. As art historian Dennis Adrian noted: “The forms which the artist favors often seem drawn from microscopic plant life, the exotic fauna of the sea or from the layered and crystalline structures of the earth itself. Statsinger’s subtle and reverberating colors make ingenious use of unexpected complements and harmonic arrangements in a way that brings to mind the marvelous chromatics of odd biological specimens or rare minerals.”[iv] Statsinger’s work from the 1980s and 1990s is exemplary of Adrian’s description. At times mysterious, or like an apparition in nature, her intricate compositions open up into vast worlds reminiscent of cell structures or cross sections of plants as viewed under a microscope. “Statsinger interprets nature as botany, and botany as biology," James Yood described in an Artforum review from 1990. "Sassacricket High, 1987, projects a sense of chlorophyll run amuck, an incessant fecundity that oozes and weaves its way across the canvas. The world here is simultaneously micro- and macrocosmic, with leave and tendrils evoked and catalogued both as individual living things and as anonymous specimens of their kind.”[v]

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Evelyn Statsinger (1927-2016) was born in Brooklyn and started her art training early at New York’s High School of Music & Art and later at the Art Students League. In Chicago, she studied for a year at the University of Chicago and received her degree from the School of the Art Institute in 1949. Statsinger initially rose to prominence with her early drawings: endlessly detailed works on paper that caught the attention of luminaries and curators in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Early exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952 and 1957 and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1954 led Time Magazine to call her “an honored one among American abstractionists” while lauding her “great mastery of textural effects.” She was frequently included in discussions of the Monster Roster school of Chicago artists, as well as the later, broader conversation around Chicago Imagism. Throughout her life, however, Statsinger made work that was profoundly individual and fiercely independent.