PAFA Presents Mia Rosenthal: Paper Lens

Exhibition of new drawings marks return of PAFA’s Morris Gallery program

October 9, 2015 - January 3, 2016

PHILADELPHIA (September 24, 2015) – The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is pleased to present Mia Rosenthal: Paper Lens, an exhibition of a celebrated alumna’s most recent work that also marks the relaunch of the museum’s Morris Gallery program.

The more than 15 new works and one site-specific drawing on view in Paper Lens are the result of Mia Rosenthal’s (MFA ’08) interest in particle physics and its study of the universe’s smallest components, which prompted her to visit the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The trip was funded by a $50,000 award from the Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship Fund.

As the massive underground particle collider helps scientists understand the structure of the subatomic world, Rosenthal’s work examines how even the tiniest components of life are interrelated – and how elements of the cosmos visible only through microscopes and telescopes can be explored.

"Like many people, pictures taken by the Hubble Telescope captivated me with their seductive beauty, and by the information they seemed to hold in them. I was particularly drawn to images that contain gravitational lensing, a phenomenon in which light bends around dense clusters of mass, which can sometimes indicate the presence of dark matter," Rosenthal explains.

In her painstakingly crafted drawings, Rosenthal takes viewers from earth to space and back again: The surface of a pizza takes on the cragginess of the moon’s surface, and sprinkles on doughnuts begin to resemble a star nebula.

“Incredible in their virtuosity, Mia Rosenthal’s drawings reveal the way in which she grapples with subjects as large as the universe and as complicated as quantum physics,” says Jodi Throckmorton, PAFA’s Curator of Contemporary Art. “Rosenthal embraces the spirit of experimentation and rigor that has long characterized the Morris Gallery program. It’s wonderful to relaunch this series with her exciting new body of work.”

Mia Rosenthal: Paper Lens , on view October 9, 2015 - January 3, 2016, marks the return of PAFA’s Morris Gallery program, which will showcase a diverse array of emerging and mid-career artists from the Philadelphia region and beyond. All of the artists will create new work, often site-specific, for their respective Morris Gallery exhibitions.

Each year, four Morris Gallery exhibitions will respond to a big question or overarching theme. For Rosenthal and the other 2015-2016 season artists -- Emil Lukas, Alyson Shotz, and Fernando Orellana -- the question is: How do artists make the invisible visible?

The Morris Gallery program, inaugurated in 1978 to showcase the work of living artists in the Philadelphia area, expanded during its more than 30-year run to exhibit work by many of the most influential artists of the time, inside and outside of the region. Some well-known examples include Robert Ryman, Vik Muniz, Nan Goldin, Laylah Ali, and Virgil Marti, among many others.