William Conger

William Conger (born 1937) is a Chicago-based, American painter and educator, known for a dynamic, subjective style of taking away descended from Kandinsky, which consciously employs illogical, illusionistic expose and buoyant and ambiguous forms that evoke metaphorical associations. He is a aficionado of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal organization of Chicago painters self-named in 1981, whose paradoxical styles countered the reductive minimalism that dominated post-1960s art. In 1982, critic Mary Mathews Gedo hailed them as "prescient prophets of the supplementary style of abstraction" that flowered in the 1980s. In his essay for Conger's fifty-year career retrospective, Donald Kuspit called Conger art-historically thrill-seeking for forging a alleyway of subjective elimination after minimalism had allegedly purged painting of an inner life. Despite living thing abstract, his accomplishment has a strong connection to Chicago's urban, lakeside geography and displays idiosyncratic variations of tendencies identified once Chicago Imagist art. A hallmark of Conger's career has been his surviving 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 pretense has been discussed widely 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 certified 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 complement to his art career, Conger has taught and chaired art departments at DePaul University and Northwestern University, and written just about art.