Ed Paschke was a member of the Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Emerging in the mid-1960s, they used vibrant color and often grotesque depictions of the human body. Paschke received both his undergraduate and master degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He developed surreal imagery and a unique representational style, often appreciating the emotional response the work elicited. Paschke explained that his confrontational work was a product of social changes he experienced in the 1960s, and his intention was to capture the energy of that decade. Paschke taught at Northwestern University from 1976 until 2004, and in 2014, the Ed Paschke Art Center opened in the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Chicago. A retrospective of his work traveled in 1989 from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Centre Pompidou and the Dallas Museum of Art, and in 2010, Paschke's former studio assistant, artist Jeff Koons, curated a show of his work for the New York gallery, Gagosian.
