Seymour Rosofsky
1924–1981

Seymour Rosofsky (1924–1981) was an American artist, who has been described as one of the key figures in twentieth-century Chicago art. He emerged in the late 1940s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1949; MFA, 1951), one of several G.I. Bill veterans, including Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli and H. C. Westermann, who would join Don Baum, Dominick Di Meo, June Leaf, and Nancy Spero to form the influential movement later dubbed the "Monster Roster" by critic Franz Schulze, which was a precursor to the more well-known Chicago Imagists. Like others in the group, Rosofsky was drawn to the unsettling, macabre side of Surrealism, initially creating gestural, expressionist renderings of grotesque, existentially angst-ridden figures in isolated or uncomfortable situations, that gave way in the 1960s to more fantastical, observational paintings that examined power, politics and domestic relationships in an unflinching way.

Rosofsky was recognized for his deftness as a painter, his interest in drawing as a process and medium, and as a caricaturist. His work was exhibited in numerous Art Institute of Chicago "Chicago and Vicinity" shows, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago survey "Art in Chicago: 1945–1995," the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a retrospective at the Krannert Art Museum (1984). He was also featured in the Franz Schulze's book Fantastic Images (1972) and Monster Roster: Existential Art in Postwar Chicago (2016). His work can be found in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.