Anatomy Now

Contemporary figurative artists rely upon knowledge of anatomy as much as their historic predecessors. Exploring the human image in the last hundred years has been a diverse and complicated journey. Finding new identity as a culture, exploring human experience in daily life and in larger historical and social contexts, re-examining older figurative traditions, finding the soul of the individual, uncovering virtue and vice, testing aesthetic beliefs and dogmas, and finding pure pleasure in the beauty and sensuality of the body have all been in the mix of what is called “modern figuration”. Whether carefully delineated or wildly distorted, anatomy has been at the core of modern figurative art.

American painters such as Ben Shahn, Leon Golub, Fairfield Porter, Philip Pearlstein, Sidney Goodman, Vincent Desiderio, Renee’ Foulks and Elizabeth Osborne all explore the wide range of modern experiences of the human image and it’s story. They strive to uncover and redefine the human voice and narrative in the 20th/21st century. Within this mix of complicate aesthetic personalities there is a strong awareness of and respect for the integrity of the human body and it’s anatomy.

The artists exhibited in Anatomy Now emerge from a great variety of these artistic roots. They use anatomy as a tool for drawing and constructing their figures, as well as a source of inspiration, beauty, narrative, symbol, expression and pictorial organization. Rather than being an overwhelming smorgasbord of conflicting choices, a figurative artist today can take strength and inspiration from the freedom available to them in pictorial possibilities. Combine this freedom with uncovering what is compelling and inspiring to an individual artist, figuration becomes a passionate journey of exploration with aesthetic ancestors and relatives as a source of support and validation.

The study of anatomy continues to be one of the important curricular points in the training of art students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The liberal beliefs of Thomas Eakins focused around knowing and trusting the visual world of observation and academic knowledge. Academy students have as a base and point of departure for all their aesthetic explorations, a curriculum that merges objective knowledge and discipline with personal expression, and artistic traditions and canons with unique creative visions. The study of anatomy at many different levels adds to the depth and breadth of the finely and broadly educated contemporary student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Anatomy, with its companion’s science, aesthetics and culture, continue to captivate and inspire modern artists going forward into 21st century.

 

Frank Bender, Kate Brockman, Jeffrey Carr, Anthony Ciambella, Pat Connors, Rachel Constantine, Vince  Desiderio, Lee Dunsmore, Paul  DuSold, Martha Erlebacher, Walter Erlebacher, Renee  Foulkes, Sidney Goodman, Michael Grimaldi, Al  Gury, John  Hoen, Darla Jackson, Alex Kanevsky, Joshua Koffman, Douglas Martenson, Dan Miller, Elizabeth  Osborne, Roberto Osti, Carolyn  Pyfrom, Jill Rupinski, Bruce Samuelson, E. Saniga, Nelson Shanks, Patricia Traub, Peter  Van Dyke, Anthony Visco, Gary Weisman, Steve  Weiss

 

Curator:
Al Gury, Professor and Chair, Painting Department