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Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Herbert George: Portrait Sculpture
Series Morris Gallery exhibitions are partially and generously funded by a grant from the Philadelphia Foundation. Nona Hershey, Evan Summer, and Herbert George all have distinct but sympathetic sensibilities. The Morris Gallery Committee chose the works of these artists to complement one another. Hershey and Summer's unpopulated environments hint at a human presence, while George's dramatic portraitheads confront the viewer with an introspective vision of the human form. Nona Hershey's works on view span the six-year period 1981 to the present. Her earliest mixed-intaglio works depict clothes-lines stretched across doorways, billowing draperies and wires wrapping around pipes or dangling from hooks. In these images, light often erupts in a play of shimmering reflections which distort and transform space. In the later prints, the mass of the building falls away. Flattened windows and doorways are alernately bathed in random streaks of stark, white light or enveloped by black shadows. In the prints from 1984 and 1985, Hershey reduces her imagery to a more linear play of curving, twisting, looping filaments, which dance across the flat backdrop of white light. In the latest intaglio prints and monoprints, Hershey returns to the deliberately scratched and coarse textures of her earlier work. This distressed background offers a strong counterpoint to delicate and inadvertent patterns of the twine. Here, randomly draped wire and string begin to take on decidedly human characteristics. Fleeting shadow often fingering out of the forms themselves inspirit these ordinary architectural elements with presence and vitality. Evan Summer's prints and collages are an intense study in line and solid geometric form. His architectural landscapes are at once futuristic and ancient, suggesting states of both construction and destruction, not completely in our realm of experience. According to Summer, his curiously unpeopled environments suggest "a technological civilization represented only by vestiges, now only partly understandable, reasons and reality gone with its builders." His collages evolved from etchings which he built up with plates made from paper glued onto aluminum board. He has painted and drawn over them with pastels, acrylic, and pencil. Summer uses a wealth of textures to depict these stark remnants of another civilization. Hundreds of finely striated lines cut through the print, the straight edges and jutting corners strongly contrasting with the inky pools and cold expanses of white and gray surfaces. In his collages, Summer plays with the texture of thickly built up pastels. Layers of gray, steel blue, and seaweed green accumulate in drifts on the surface. Nearly every image includes a gently curving architectural element. This form softens not only the regular progression of geometric slabs but also the chunky heaps of discard. Relics of the actual and the imagined combine to warp our sense of what was and what may be. Herbert George's diverse portraitheads were worked from the same sitter over an extended period of time. Some are painted with successive layers of purple, blue, orange, and pink washes. Others retain the white of Hydro-cal, his casting material, which is a type of very hard plaster. A network of roughly filed marks crisscross the painted surface and often penetrate through to the white Hydro-cal underneath. Some of the heads have gouged sections and parts of the face modelled in the negative. The scratch marks and the cutaway sections vary the surface on which light can play. George's main concern in these heads is the literal and metaphorical edge that separates light and shadow. He challenges the notion of shadow as absence of form. Is the seam that separates the two the edge of the light or is the edge of the shadow? According to George, his portraitheads employ light and shade as metaphor for aspects of human consciousness. Their stately exterior calm belies the jagged contours of their interior realms. Anne Classen Herbert George Awards/Grants Selected Individual Exhibitions Selected Group Exhibitions Selected Public Collections
Nona Hershey Selected individual Exhibitions Selected Group Exhibitions
Selected Public Collections
Evan Summer Selected Awards/Grants Selected Individual Exhibitions Selected Group Exhibitions 1979 1982 1985-86 1986 Selected Public Collections The Morris Gallery displays the work of outstanding conemporary artists with a connection to Philadelphia, determined by birth,.school or residence. The exhibitions are chosen by a committee composed of area artists, museum personnel and collectors, and the curatorial staff of the Academy. Currently serving on the Morris Gallery Exhibition Committee are: Cynthia Carlson, Jennie W. Dietrich, Ofelia Garcia, Dr. HeIen Herrick, Harold Jacobs, Jay Richardson Massey, Charles Mather 111, Cheryl McClenney, John Moore, Mark Rosenthal; Academy staff Judith Stein, Morris Gallery coordinator, Frank Goodyear, Jr., Linda Bantel, Betty Romanella; and, Academy students Ed Lewis and Anna Yates. Copyright Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1987 |