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At times, the artwork of the Chicago Imagists verges on the gross: that big green bogey dangling from the nostril of Officer E Doodit, a beady-eyed policeman with a bulging neck in Jim Nutt’s painting of 1968, is just the beginning Nutt’s portrait is part of a new exhibition at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Contemporary Art that explores the gaudy fruits of the Imagists’ labour   All but one of the 14 artists in the show graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s, studying and working together, exchanging thoughts and techniques Across two decades they exhibited together in sub-groups with wacky monikers such as the Hairy Who (a riff on the name of a Chicago radio station’s then art critic Harry Bouras) and the Nonplussed Some Their unconventional displays at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Centre took place during a period of national unrest that culminated in 1968, the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War, when the streets of Chicago became a battleground between police and anti-war protestors   Gladys Nilsson was one of the first Imagists to graduate, in 1962 Appearing on all three floors of CCA, her pieces are chaotic and crowded: fantastical creatures jostle for elbowroom in her watercolour MORE FOWL BEASTS (1970), with claw-like fingers and elongated, acute-angled limbs They’re humorous too: in RENTED BATHING SUITS (1965), a curious crowd in poorly fitting pinstriped swimming costumes share a patch of sand on the beach A swine-like animal is wearing both a bathing suit and a top hat, while a bespectacled woman with sagging breasts and a slack jaw holds a parasol above a curly-haired sheep   Like the rest of the Imagists, Nilsson was taught by professors whose interests extended beyond the canon to include non-western practices and quotidian subjects and materials The artist Ray Yoshida encouraged his students to experiment by drawing with lipstick and mustard Other tutors introduced folk art, ethnography and surrealism, asking students to pay attention to tribal masks, hand-painted shop signs and comic books Many of the Imagists painted on Plexiglass, inspired by the reverse graphics on pinball machines, giving their work a glossy sheen   The Imagists painted, etched and sculpted characters that mirrored the