Edna Andrade: Optical Paintings, 1963-1986

January 18 - April 6, 2003


Edna Andrade
Space Frame B, 1965, oil on canvas, 50 x 50”, Courtesy Locks Gallery
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to announce a major retrospective of the Optical Paintings of Edna Andrade. Presented in the Eleanor Biddle Lloyd Gallery, the exhibition will include over forty paintings spanning a 23-year period of this important and under-recognized artist. The exhibition is curated for ICA by art historian/independent curator Debra Bricker Balken.

Since the 1960s, Edna Andrade (b. 1917) has created a body of paintings that pursues a formal logic based in geometric abstraction and opticality. Influenced by modernist painters such as Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Josef Albers, Andrade's paintings incorporate a pared-down vocabulary of shapes, such as circles, triangles, squares, and pentagons and a deceptively simple color palate made more complex through the works' compositions.

 
Edna Andrade
Temple, 1986, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 37”, Collection of Fred and Kathryn Giampietro
ICA's exhibition will focus on paintings from 1963 through 1986: a period when Andrade followed a distinctly optical course, and one which historically coincides with Op Art, Minimalism, and Pattern and Decoration Painting -- movements in art that relate to the pure pursuit of geometric and abstract design. Concerned more with the psychology of perception than with expression or narrative, Andrade has written, “with the new art, paintings are no longer to be looked at -- or into … They possess positive action.” That is to say, they create an active, bodily, and visual engagement with their viewers. In many ways, Andrade's work from this period may be seen to presage our own technological Zeitgeist's fascination with data, repetition, and images as built perceptual machines.

A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, Andrade has worked as an art teacher and a designer in addition to making paintings. She has received numerous awards and fellowships including the College Art Association Award for Distinguished Teaching of Art in 1996 and the Philadelphia Mayor's Arts and Culture Award for Visual Arts in 1991. In 1997, The Leeway Foundation established the Edna Andrade Emerging Artist Award to encourage and assist in the advancement of women artists who demonstrate exceptional promise early in their artistic careers. Her work has been the subject of numerous museum and gallery exhibitions including two solo exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1967, 1993).


Edna Andrade
Cool Circuit, 1969, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60”, Courtesy Locks Gallery
She has also received public commissions throughout her career. This exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog publication featuring essays by Debra Bricker Balken and ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner. An exhibition of the artist's more recent figurative paintings will run concurrently at the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, where she has shown since 1971.

The Opening Reception, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled for Friday, January 17, 2003 from 6 to 8pm. An Exhibition walkthrough, led by Edna Andrade and curator Debra Bricker Balken, will take place on Friday, January 17 at 4:30pm.

Catalog now available!