This weekend, the Academy Art Museum opens three new exhibition, including Chul Hyun Ahn: Perceiving Infinity, Eva Lundsager: Elsewhere, and Anne Truitt at the Academy Art Museum, which will be on display through January 26, 2014. The exhibitions are sponsored by the Talbot County Arts Council and the Maryland State Arts Council.
Chul Hyun Ahn was born in Busan, South Korea. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the Mount Royal School at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. Ahn creates sculptures utilizing light, color, and illusion as physical representations of his investigation of infinite space. He achieves this through the use of electrical light sources including Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), fluorescent, and black lights set between mirrors and one-way mirrors combined with housings made of plywood, cast concrete, or cast acrylic materials. Ahn’s mirrored light sculptures arose out of his background as a painter. In 2011, Ahn began a new body of work entitled “Mirror Drawings” which re-introduced his own painterly hand to the work. The drawings are made by scratching into the back of the mirror layer to create line-based, abstract images instead of allowing the construction of lights themselves to form that image. Ahn’s first solo exhibition was with C. Grimaldis Gallery in 2003 and his works are in numerous private and public collections in Paris, Karlsruhe, Seoul, Istanbul, Dubai and closer to home at the Delaware Art Museum, amongst many others. The exhibition will be accompanied by a small publication and has been made possible with the generous support of the C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore.
Eva Lundsager’s paintings “sing beautifully of landscape without ever describing one.” Inventing a vivid unreal world, her abstract canvases teeter on the edge of recognition. Growing up in semi-rural Maryland in the ’60s and ‘70s, Lundsager freely roamed the farms, woods, and caves along the Patuxent River and made frequent visits to the museums of Washington, DC. Lundsager received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Maryland, where she studied with artists Ann Truitt, Sam Gilliam, Claudia DeMonte and the art historian and theorist Jack Burnham. Moving to New York in 1985 to attend the MFA program at Hunter College, Lundsager studied with the painters Ralph Humphrey, Susan Crile, and Marcia Hafif, and the ceramicist Susan Peterson. Lundsager’s work is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the St. Louis Art Museum. She has completed two public artworks, one a billboard-sized outdoor painting for Public Notice, an exhibition at Laumeier Sculpture Park, now permanently installed at the City Academy in St. Louis. The exhibition will be accompanied by a small publication and has been made possible with the generous support of the Van Doren Waxter Gallery, New York.
The artist Anne Truitt was born in Baltimore in 1921 and spent her childhood in Easton. She lived in a house on South Street, just a block from the Academy Art Museum. She travelled extensively before eventually settling in Washington, DC. Her paintings and sculpture are noted for their simple linear qualities and investigation of color relationships. Critics have often associated her with both Minimalism and the Washington Color Field artists, although like many artists she rejected reductive classifications. She had a successful career showing her work extensively in New York City and across the country. Along with her art Truitt was noted as a teacher and as an author of memoirs: Daybook (1982), Turn (1986), and Prospect (1996). She died in Washington in 2004. In 2009 the Hirshhorn Museum mounted a major retrospective of Truitt’s career.
There will be curator-led tours of both the Ahn and Lundsager exhibitions on Friday, December 6, 20 at 12 noon and on Wednesday, January 8, 2014 at 12 noon. The Kittredge-Wilson Lecture Series on December 12, 2013 at 6 p.m. will feature a lecture, Easton’s Influence: A Sense of Place in Anne Truitt’s Art by Kristen Hileman, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. For further information about the Museum’s exhibitions and programs, visit academyartmuseum.org or call 410-822-2787.