"On weekends I would stretch canvases in Ed's studio. At the end of the day Ed would ask me, "Do you want to go out tonight? I'd like to show you this club I just went to." He took me to tattoo parlors, a midget bar on the south side, a club where a pregnant woman was dancing, her whole body tattooed. Garish colors, risque costumes and flashing neon lights all became part of his painting. He taught me to create my own personal iconography from the world around me."

– Jeff Koons, 2015

Paschke is talkative, though not self-revealing. I feel as though he's warming up to real conversation with stories that have been rehearsed and fine-tuned. He acts out the one about making himself into a snake: "Well, I transformed myself into an object once, actually; I put these tattoos all over myself. They weren't real tattoos. I just drew all over myself with marking pens. I was going to have myself photographed for a poster for a show I was having. I just loved the way it felt. I looked in the mirror and moved around like a snake. It took days to wash it off. Then I thought, wouldn't it be great to be able to feel this way anytime I wanted to, so I took an old white shirt and drew on that, so whenever I wanted..." He is a tall, thin man in nondescript beige clothes, pretending to be standing in front of a mirror, twisting his whole body in graceful reptilian gesticulations. The long erratic tube of light you would think would quit sputtering doesn't. He gestures to a plastic hose filled with discarded colored sponges. "I'm making an art sausage," he says.

– Susan Bergman, 1988

ABOUT ED PASCHKE

Ed Paschke was born in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois. He received both his BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations both stateside and abroad, including exhibitions at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University; the Art Institute of Chicago; Gagosian Gallery, New York; the National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland; Galerie Darthea Speyer, Paris; Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Dallas Museum of Art. His work is frequently featured in major group exhibitions, including recent presentations at Goldsmiths CCA, London; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. His work is held in numerous public collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musee d'Art Moderne Nationale, Paris; Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts, Vienna; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Ed Paschke lived and worked in Chicago, until his death in 2004.