Lecturer: Patricia Likos Ricci, Professor of the History of Art, Director of the Fine Arts Department, Elizabethtown College
At the forefront of the cultural shift to postmodernism, Philadelphia painter Larry Day was among the artists who abandoned Abstract Expressionism to explore the expressive potential of figurative painting in the 1960s. For Day, the art of previous centuries was very much alive and spoke to him in a language of space and form, myth and metaphor, that was not yet extinct. Like a time-traveler, he engaged in visual dialogues with artists of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, anachronistically blending their compositions and figures with his own social circle in Philadelphia.
“Because the concern is with mythic factors,” he wrote, “the present and the past co-exist as do disparate images brought together by a suspended temporal world.” Rendered with his masterly drawing technique, Day’s unique genre of realism is by turns ironic, mysterious, ambiguous, witty, and ultimately profound. Like memories externalized, he represents people in places they can only inhabit in the artist’s mind where time and space have no boundaries. A philosophical artist, Larry Day invites the viewer to participate in his sustained meditation on the timelessness of art as an existential search for meaning.
$15 ($10 members)