Dates:
June 26 - September 20, 2009
Location:
Fisher Brooks Gallery, Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building
Description:
Long recognized by critics and her peers as one of the most innovative and daring Philadelphia-based artists of the last forty years, Elizabeth Osborne (born 1936) has tirelessly explored the psychologically-charged space between abstraction and realism. Osborne studied at PAFA (1954-58) and has been a faculty member since 1963. A prolific and frequent exhibitor in Philadelphia and throughout the United States, Osborne has produced a multivalent and challenging body of work that has shifted tone and content gradually since the 1960s. Although she is well-known to Philadelphia audiences, there has never been a full survey of her work. This exhibition and its accompanying publication will reveal the range, depth, and importance of Osborne's art and place it in the context of postwar American art.
Osborne may be known to some for her virtuoso, glowing realist watercolors of the late 1970s or monumental, hallucinatory landscapes of the early and mid-1970s; still others may know her recent boldly-painted ruminations of nature in its micro- and macrocosm. Yet Osborne's oeuvre is full of surprises, stylistically experimental yet cohesive, hauntingly introspective and complex in its artistic and personal associations. The Color of Light will bring together works from all periods in her career, from a provocative series of 1960s interiors, to innovative land- and seascapes of the 1970s, ambitious large still-lifes of the late 1970s and early 1980s and increasingly abstract work of the past two decades. Approximately fifty paintings will be included, as well as a selection of works on paper, source materials and sketchbooks from the artist's collection.
Unique among Philadelphia painters, Osborne has used her rigorous PAFA training in concert with a life-long exploration of the meaning, metaphorical power and spiritual associations of light and color. Clearly composed and impeccably designed, Osborne's compositions integrate the intensely observed world through a thorough study of minimalist and color field painting. The result is a body of work that elides abstraction into realism and challenges the viewer to rethink distinctions between these ways of seeing and depicting the world.
A catalogue written by Robert Cozzolino and published by Bunker Hill Press will accompany the exhibition. This richly illustrated book will be a comprehensive stand-alone in-depth study of Osborne’s career and promises to be the standard work on her for years to come.
Curator:
Robert Cozzolino, Curator of Modern Art
Sponsors:
Anonymous donor
Linda Lee Alter
Joanne and Graham Berwind
Luther W. Brady
Dorothy J. del Bueno
Dr. Janice T. Gordon
Mrs. Henry F. Harris
Mr. and Mrs. Joseph F. Huber
Victor F. Keen
Maxine and Howard H. Lewis
Guna and Robert Mundheim
Jan Nicholson
Orleans Homebuilders
Jon and Sue Stiklorius
Bayard and Frances Storey
Barbara and Leonard Sylk
Click here to read Edward Sozanski's review in the Philadelphia Inquirer.