Edna Andrade

January 12, 2006, Philadelphia, PA - Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Philadelphia artist Edna Andrade on the occasion of her 90th birthday. Focusing on her optical paintings from the 1960s, the exhibition includes several works that have not been exhibited in four decades. These ten paintings, covering nearly a decade of the artist’s work, focus on just one phase of Andrade’s long career and pays tribute to one of Philadelphia’s most respected and cherished artists.

The exhibition includes several of Andrade’s major Op art paintings, which combine hard-edged geometric forms and lines into illusory, and sometimes hallucinatory, compositions. The exhibition also includes several abstract paintings leading up to her optical works.

Andrade will be part of a major Op Art exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio in February. A retrospective of her works on paper will be on view at the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill, opening March 28.

Andrade’s optical paintings were the subject of a retrospective at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 2003. 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).

Since 1971, Edna Andrade has been represented exclusively by Locks Gallery. Her work has been featured in over twenty one-person exhibitions and is included in museum collections across the country including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Yale University Art Gallery.