FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Allison Benner, College Relations Associate – Media, 610-740-3790

GALLERY EXHIBIT: ROBERT SCHATZ – "( )scapes: Between Abstraction and Reality"

Allentown Native and Former Baum School Student to Exhibit at Cedar Crest College

Allentown, PA (December 23, 2005) – Robert Schatz will display a selection of his works in “( )scapes: Between Abstraction and Reality,” a new exhibition at Cedar Crest College. The exhibit will be on display in the Cressman Gallery, located in the Cressman Library, and will open on January 23, 2006 with an artist talk from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. A reception for the artist will follow his talk.

Educated in fine art as well as history and philosophy, Robert Schatz has explored abstraction since the late 1980s, pursuing his interest in the structure of pictorial space and the poetry of markmaking. Schatz describes his work as rooted in both American gestural abstraction as well as in the landscape and calligraphic traditions of Chinese and Japanese art, in which marks were also understood to represent the physicality and emotional presence of the body.

"My work is rooted in the energies of the body and of Nature," says Schatz. "Nature is, by definition, an energetic system – the forms and structures that we perceive with our senses are really manifestations of constant movement and the flow of force."

The exhibition at Cedar Crest will include eleven works, the majority of which consist of black paint on music paper as well as some pieces in color. Schatz notes that, thematically, his work has several layers of meaning. "At the most basic and accessible, it would not be wrong to say that these works are re-interpretations of landscape painting," he says. "'Scape' means a view, and so these works may be thought of as views into the energetic nature of reality."

Schatz's work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad, including several one-person shows in New York and Paris. His art is in the permanent collections of the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, the Pollock Center for Works on Paper at Southern Methodist University, the U.S. Department of State, and Pfizer Inc, as well as in many private collections in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Schatz was born in Allentown, and as a young man studied at the Baum School of Art and later at the Barnstone Studios. He earned a bachelor of arts, magna cum laude, in history and philosophy at the University of Scranton, and continued his fine art studies at Massachusetts College of Art and The Art Institute of Boston. He currently lives and works in New York.

The exhibit will run from January 23, 2006 through June 2, 2006 and is free and open to the public. The gallery is open from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Monday to Saturday and Sunday from Noon to 9:00 p.m. Contact the Cressman Library at 610-606-4666, ext. 3535 for details. For more information, please contact Vicki DaSilva, gallery coordinator, at 610-606-4666, ext. 3469

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