Sid Sachs

Larry Day (1921-1998) was a distinguished painter and a dominant force in American art from the 1950s through the 1990s. Referred to as "the dean of Philadelphia painters," he was a charismatic teacher to several generations of artists, many of whom are important figures in the arts today. This celebratory catalogue will explore his contributions to the art of his time, and the lasting power of his observations and imagination. Day's first successes were with abstracted views of nature, but he is perhaps best known for figurative portraits and architectural landscapes, which he continued to develop for the rest of his career. The driving force behind Day's paintings was an intense engagement with earlier art and a deep classicism that governed his views of human interactions and the built environment. In the last decades of his life, he made several series of haunting and mysterious figure com-positions that mix everyday scenes with earlier works of art, fully integrating past and present. Day's art tells us that life is deeply imbricated with the past, and that reality is not a matter of simple observation, but is made up of memories and experience of all kinds of images—from art, literature, film, television, and fashion magazines. This fully illustrated catalogue will focus on Day's working process and relationships between his paintings and drawings. It will include a selection of Day's writings along with scholarly articles that will affirm Day's singular place within midcentury American art and his equally important legacy.

John Stezaker’s found images, collages and image fragments are most associated with cinematic imagery, however it is the other found-image sources which he has worked with over the past 30 years which is the focus of this publication; notably the artist’s 'Bridge' collages and the anatomical nudes of his 'Fall' and 'Expulsion' series. This catalogue – published in association with Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, which showed the exhibition John Stezaker: Nude and Landscape in October 2011 – centres on Stezaker’s works from the 1980s, when he switched from the cinematic imagery of the 1970s towards ‘an engagement with the culture of the image to the nature of the image’. The catalogue presents many new works that have not been shown before and, interestingly, also unaltered found images so similar to the Stezaker collages that they are only identifiable when focusing on the absence or presence of the artist’s cut. Over 40 full-colour images are accompanied by texts by curator Sid Sachs, who explores the relationship between the landscape and the nude, and Elizabeth Manchester who looks at the notion and role of ‘The Source’ in Stezaker’s work.