The Boca Raton Museum of Art announces Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism an exhibition on view April 26 – June 19.
This exhibition presents approximately 40 works from Vickrey’s 60-year career as the living master of tempera painting. After studying with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League, Vickrey (born in New York City 1926- ) went on to Yale in the 1940s, where he learned egg tempera from Lewis E. York.
ROBERT VICKREY, Sea Breeze, 1985, egg tempera on board, 20 x 30 inches. Permanent Collection 1993.340. Gift of the artist
Using the same labor-intensive techniques practiced by Renaissance artists Giotto and Botticelli, Vickrey has become America’s leading modern master of this centuries-old medium and is unquestionably egg tempera’s most innovative practitioner. As a painting medium, egg tempera has a short drying time, enabling overpainting and revision, and its distinctive matte surface allows for meticulous detail and textural illusion. Vickrey makes changes by scraping paint with a razor, by scumbling, stippling, sponging and sandpapering. An acknowledged master of this traditional medium, he uses egg tempera in original and idiosyncratic ways in paintings which capture the same quietude and mystery as those of American realists Edward Hopper, George Tooker and Andrew Wyeth.
Robert Vickrey continues today to mix egg yolks with ground pigments to create realist images that incorporate symbols and subjects from his personal observations. Vickrey’s subjects are distinctly contemporary figures placed in almost surreal landscapes defined by exaggerated shadows and light. His egg tempera works are included in more than 80 American art museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery, and the National Academy of Design.
This exhibition is organized with the assistance of Harmon-Meek Gallery, Naples, Florida. Accompanying the exhibition is the publication “Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism,” published by Hudson Hills Press, a 224-page, 170-color-plate volume authored by Dr. Philip Eliasoph, professor of art history, Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut.
www.bocamuseum.org