October 10 - November 13, 2026
Reception: 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, October 9

Portrait Society Gallery is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of work by Bernard Gilardi (1920-2008), a self-taught artist who made paintings in his basement studio for more than 40 years. This exhibition will celebrate the gallery’s move to a new location in Walker’s Point at 900 S. 5th Street. Previously located for 17 years on the fifth floor of the Marshall building in the Third Ward, the gallery is excited to have  ground-floor space. 

 

PSG has represented the estate of Bernard Gilardi for 15 years but has not presented a major show of his work in over a decade. Although Gilardi worked in obscurity in Milwaukee, making paintings during evenings and weekends after his job at a printing company, his work has achieved national recognition. When PSG started showing the work in New York, during the annual Outsider Art Fair, it caught the eye of the internationally known artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose work includes "Comedian," a banana taped to a gallery wall, which was first shown in 2019 at Art Basel Miami. 

 

It is no coincidence that Cattelan was attracted to Gilardi’s work and became a major collector. Cattelan’s sense of humor and love of irony meets Gilardi’s similiarly playful attitude. Over his long career, Gilardi tackled a range of subjects through a gently skewed lens. Politics, gender dynamics, segregation, racial conflict, and religion were topics he interpreted with humor and some irreverance, while continuously exposing the inherent contradictions and absurdities of doctine, authority and narrow minded thinking. 

 

In 2019, Cattelan partnered with Portrait Society to curate a solo show for Gilardi at Shrine Gallery in New York. The exhibition was reviewed by major art publicatons, including The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Observer, Artsy, Art Forum, Time Out New York. 

 

Another celebrity, David Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads, was also drawn to Gilardi’s work and became the second major collector. Byrne, with his partner Mala Gaonkar, produced an immersive theater production called Theater of the Mind, which is currently being staged in Chicago. One of the sets is an attic studio, where the fictional character is an artist. The room is filled with paintings by Gilardi.

 

The art world, despite its challenges and gate keeping, can be a place where unlikely individuals meet across time and location, where the unknown becomes known through a set of coincidences and intersections. During Gilardi’s lifetime, he rarely showed his work but remained a committed artist who created about 300 oil paintings over a 40 year period, all of which were neatly stacked against his basement studio walls upon his death. 

 

The ninth of 11 children from a second generation Italian family, Gilardi grew up in Wisconsin Rapids and was recognized in high school for his artistic prowess. After serving in the military, marrying and having two children, his desire to be an artist did not abate. The paintings range from inventive and sometimes slightly outrageous scenes of people and places (often with Wisconsin references), to ironic interpretations of the decades' political and social issues, including poignant depictions of racial conflict during the 1960s civil rights protests.  Gilardi often painted on the back or more textured side, of masonite. His work is characterized by vivid colors, summer skies, horizontal bands of landscape, and figures that seemed stylistically influeced by the underground cartoon movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, including Mad Magazine. 

 

Gilardi's work was first shown publicly in 2010 at Portrait Society Gallery. In 2012 he was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Wisconsin Art. Lawrence University in Appleton, WI hosted a solo exhibition of his religious themed paintings in 2012. PSG has presented his work a number of times at the Outsider Art Fair in New York City. A solo exhibition, organized by Maurizio Cattelan, PSG and Shrine Gallery, NY, was in 2019.

 

Gildari's work is in the collections of the Chazen Museum of Art (Madison); the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend); and Intuit Museum (Chicago).

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