Opening Reception for the Artist from 5 to 8 PM Saturday, February 7, 2009
Los Angeles, CA - Celebrated L.A. contemporary artist Ruth Weisberg is the subject of a new exhibition, "Ruth Weisberg - Selected Works,” opening with a reception for the artist from 5 to 8 PM. on Saturday, February 7, 2009 at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, located at 357 North La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. The exhibition extends through April 18, 2009.
Ruth Weisberg has garnered an extraordinary roster of honors and prizes. She is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum; the museum’s first-ever solo exhibition of a contemporary painter extends through March 2. A similar distinction was afforded Weisberg by the Huntington Library and Art Collections in San Marino in 1999-2000, which invited the artist to create a body of work inspired by a work on paper in its collection. Weisberg’s response to William Blake's engravings for Dante's Inferno represented the first solo exhibition by a contemporary painter at the Huntington.
On February 27, as part of the College Art Association Conference (the nation’s largest and most distinguished collective of art historians, artists and educators) held this year in Los Angeles, Weisberg will one of two artists featured in the annual “Distinguished Artist Series.” (The other artist selected this year is Robert Irwin) In conjunction with the CAA conference, the Women’s Caucus for Art will award Weisberg this year’s Lifetime Achievement award on Feb. 28.
The Rutberg Gallery exhibition "Ruth Weisberg - Selected Works" features paintings and works on paper spanning several decades that reveal Weisberg's unique vision through which the viewer sees the convergence of art history, personal memory, and cultural experience. This impression of multi-layered moments in time is often enhanced to striking effect by Weisberg's innovative use of fresco-like qualities in her paintings and works on paper. In her large-scale painting, Time and Time Again, for example, Weisberg has re-imagined Titian's masterpiece, Amor Sacro e Profano; the landscape is the stage for two tango partners passionately engaged in their dance and each other - a mysterious collision of old and new worlds. Other works explore universal themes of childhood, maternity, spirituality, and personal memory as evocatively filtered through the lens of time.
Ruth Weisberg is Dean of University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts, and is a former Fulbright scholar, past President of the College Art Association and honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Hebrew Union College. In addition to her many distinctions and achievements, Weisberg’s works have been the subject of more than 70 solo and 160 group exhibitions. Her work is in the permanent collections of more than sixty major museums and universities internationally, including the Whitney and Metropolitan Museums in New York, the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angles County Museum of Art, Instituto Nationale per La Grafica, Italy, and the Biblioteque Nationale of France.
Also on View: Hans Burkhardt: Paintings of the 1960s Part II
