How can I buy a work by William Conger?

Bruno David Gallery handles the sale of available works by William Conger. For prices and availability, email info@brunodavidgallery.com or call +1 314 696 2377.

What does William Conger make?

Non-representational abstract paintings of precise rectilinear and rounded shapes, in flat or shaded color, that hint at real-world identities and evoke memories, places and events.

Where is William Conger based?

William Conger lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.

Has William Conger had an exhibition at Bruno David Gallery?

Yes. Lumen (20 September to 21 December 2024) is one of his exhibitions at the gallery. Catalogues can be read in the gallery’s Publications library at brunodavidgallery.com/publications.

William Conger

William Conger (born 1937) is a Chicago-based painter who has pursued a lifelong investigation of non-representational abstraction nuanced by the suggestion of illusionism. His precise arrangements of rectilinear and rounded shapes, in flat or shaded color, hint at real-world identities while remaining anonymous, evoking private and cultural memories, allusions, places and events.

Conger studied with Raymond Jonson at the University of New Mexico (B.F.A., 1960) and received an M.F.A. from the University of Chicago in 1966. He chaired the art department at DePaul University from 1971 to 1984, when he moved to Northwestern University; there he served as professor and chair of the Department of Art Theory and Practice and retired as professor emeritus in 2006.

Conger has exhibited since 1958, including the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Chicago and Vicinity” exhibitions (1963–1985), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s “Abstract Art in Chicago” (1976) and “Art in Chicago 1945–1995” (1996), and “Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art” at Newfields, Indianapolis (2021). The Chicago Cultural Center presented his fifty-year retrospective, “William Conger: Paintings 1958–2008,” in 2009. “Lumen” (2024) was his third solo exhibition at Bruno David Gallery.

His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Illinois State Museum, among others. He received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2011, and his public commissions include “Today” (2025), a glass mosaic at the CTA’s Bryn Mawr Red Line station. He co-founded the journal Chicago/Art/Write in 1986.

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