She Painted With the Hairy Who. Now She’s Going Big, at 79.

In 1966, Gladys Nilsson and five other young artists organized an exhibition of their work in Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center, and overnight became the talk of the town. The group called themselves the Hairy Who.

Their art could be caustic, outré, vulgar and loud; psychedelic patterns and clashing colors abounded. It was bad taste and brilliant fun. Tattoos, graffiti, comic books, fanzines, games and toys, newspaper and magazine advertisements were all influences, as was the encyclopedic, global collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rooted in the Surrealist traditions of Chicago’s art scene, it was unlike anything else in America at that time.

Ms. Nilsson’s work stood somewhat apart from that of her peers, especially her watercolors of animalistic creatures which are rendered with extraordinary delicacy and subtlety. She also adopted a graphic technique borrowed from her husband, fellow Hairy Who member Jim Nutt, for painting in acrylic on the back of Plexiglas, as in “A Cold Mouth” (1968). Some of her earliest paintings are included alongside her most recent canvases in “Gladys Nilsson: Honk! Fifty Years of Painting,” a two-venue survey that opened Jan. 30 at Garth Greenan Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery.

In 1969, the Hairy Who amicably elected to disband. Along with other artists of the 1960s, they are now often lumped under the banner of Chicago Imagism. Ms. Nilsson has since chosen to follow her own idiosyncratic path. (Reviewing a gallery show in 2014, with work combining collage with gouache, colored pencil and watercolor on paper, Roberta Smith of The New York Times described the work as “altogether looser, funnier and more aggressive than before,” and “her strongest yet.”) With renewed interest in recent years in Imagism and in figure painting more broadly, Ms. Nilsson, 79, is enjoying a late uptick in attention, as demonstrated by this, her most extensive exhibition to date.