A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Green studied alongside and participated in early exhibitions with Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson and other young Chicago artists who dubbed themselves The Hairy Who. Green’s early paintings were influenced by Surrealist painters Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte and by popular culture sources, including underground comics. Delicate Situation is typical of the artist’s work of the 1960s in its bright colors, architectural structure and the imagery that dominates the composition—an obese leg, raging flames and gigantic ice cream cone. Green comments that he was seeking to make paintings that were “awkward and monstrous, boring and familiar.”