Ed Paschke (1939-2004, Chicago) was an American painter who, although trained in the principles of abstraction and expressionism, gravitated towards figurative representations of popular cultures and social references. Deeply inspired by Andy Warhol, Outsider Art, and tattoo design, he mined the underside of American values– fame, violence, sex, and money– to arrive at colorful, often humorous compositions of characters and figures. One of his studio assistants in the mid-1970s was the artist Jeff Koons, then a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, on whom Paschke had a formative influence.

Paschke had an important solo exhibition at The Renaissance Society in 1982. The Centre Pompidou held a retrospective of his work in 1989, and his work is held in many institutional collections, such as the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum.

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