“I began looking at a lot of television… Not so much the content, just the formalistic aspect of how it was all put together. All those horizontal lines collectively compose a picture. And also, in many cases, the way some sets are tuned-in but they are not really registered in sync. You get maybe a red edge around somebody over here and a blue edge over there. Snow or static.”
Ed Paschke, 1983

The pioneering Chicagoan, Ed Paschke, is celebrated for his exquisitely eccentric paintings, bursting with wild, vibrant and surreal imagery. Dos Egos, painted in 1984, shows two technicolor heads grimacing against a deep field of black. The feathered texture of the surface and the soft blending of color suggest the grainy focus of a television set flickering to life. Rendered in a heroic scale, Dos Egos towers over the viewer, emanating a tremendously trippy kind of mystery. The title of the painting, Dos Egos, is also the title of a collaborative video performance work directed by Paschke, which premiered on 6 September 1984 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as part of The Science of Fiction / The Fiction of Science, a three-night video art extravaganza.
Paschke’s bombastic approach to image-making is part of a rich tradition of contemporary Midwestern art. Incorporating the aesthetics of disparate artistic movements including Art Brut, tattooing and comic books, Paschke and his contemporaries forged an incredibly weird visual universe that seemed defiantly out of step with Minimalism, and far left of field of Pop, the prevailing isms of the day. These artists formed three influential collectives: The Monster Roster, The Hairy Who and The Chicago Imagists—Paschke was a leading member of the latter.