The artist Gladys Nilsson is one of our great watercolorists, and also one of our great mannerists. Mannerist in the sense that she distorts human proportions to stay true both to some private vision and to that very public fact of life, bodily strangeness. On the left side of her tall and hectic watercolor Caught (1986) stands a nude with a beaked nose, a barrel chest, and a phallus so large it could be a third leg. At the far right is a woman with triangle breasts, a cleft vulva, and a mischievous smile. Adam and Eve? “Caught” between them are a bunch of pink and orange people, clothed, alarmed, and textured with leathery, almost tie-dyed lifts from the wet surface, a technique at which Nilsson excels. Society? Hell? Behind, a frieze of listless, phallus-dragging men and affable, gabbing women cross the horizon. The future?

Watercolor doesn’t forgive, and the implied planning and the lack of outline in big works like this are what make the exhibition—the first museum retrospective for Nilsson, who is eighty-six—so strong. Curated by Francesca Wilmott, the show suggests that Nilsson is a major living artist who has worked in a largely graphic illustration tradition but who can also quote the biblical scenes of Cranach, the paned compositions of Chagall, and the rounded figures of Léger. Caught channels all three.

Wilmott manages to free Nilsson from association with her famous early cohort. In 1966, four years after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she formed Hairy Who, a liberated, in-your-face exhibiting group, with her husband—the painter Jim Nutt—and four other SAIC alumni. In works on paper and plexiglass from the three years they showed together, she portrayed dense, berserk crowds of people that meshed with the graphic perversity of her comrades as well as with popular commercial artists like Heinz Edelmann. By the early Seventies, showing solo at the Whitney and living in Sacramento with Nutt and their son, she was trying very different moods with varying success. In addition to the tightly controlled watercolors, there are small abstractions of people-creatures on canvas stretched on embroidery hoops. Those seem to align her briefly with the feminist Pattern and Decoration movement, though the satisfaction Nilsson so clearly finds in painting feels basically apolitical.

That satisfaction seems to have deepened through the 2010s, when she made work that she deemed “sloppy drawings,” alluding to her rediscovery of the loping, comic possibilities of line, as well as the speed of acrylic. Her recent murals of large, tangled processionals of people, at the Menil Collection in Houston and other museums around the country, are represented here on video and in photographs.

Giantesses stomp through her oeuvre like Godzilla, from the early oil painting Gigantica (1962) to her hilarious collage drawings of the 2010s. They could be a riposte to the id-soaked women of R. Crumb, but I found them less pointed, more a reflection of how benevolent narcissism lets us imagine ourselves. In the rooms of our minds we are the largest people. So are her women, wrapped around furniture or the teeny bodies of others. They can be flabby monsters (Spark, 2023) or middle-aged professionals hustling their checked bags through the airport (Suitcases, 1993). Some are Nilsson herself, directing art handlers (Gleefully Askew, 2019) or blowing out her eightieth birthday candles and then crawling away like a spider, breasts and flesh spilling from her blouse (Even Bigger Birthday Gladys, 2020). There is a whiff of body positivity in the curation here. And why not?

In subject, Nilsson’s work recalls certain gendered touchstones of her time—the comic Cathy, the TV show The Mommies, the self-help book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus—but with an acidity and gluttony made possible by her precise style. Nilsson seems to have always been content with her calling and her world, and always able to steamroll through the fleshy realities of the human figure without a single apparent thought for the social hang-ups that often encumber such truthfulness today.