Elizabeth Osborne

Elizabeth Osborne (born 1936) has been a prominent figure in Philadelphia and at the Pennsylvania Academy since the 1950s. An influential painter and teacher, Osborne has been engaged with capturing the transitory effects of color and light through a variety of shifting subjects since the 1960s. Elizabeth Osborne: The Color of Light brings together works from all periods in her career, from a haunting series of interiors, to innovative land- and seascapes of the 1970s, ambitious large watercolors of the 1980s and work of the past two decades exploring nature’s micro and macrocosm.

Approximately forty paintings, drawings and watercolors as well as the artist’s sketchbooks are included and reveal the numerous ways Osborne has used color, often un-modulated, to represent the nuances of light and atmosphere. Elizabeth Osborne: The Color of Light traces how Osborne responded to developments of 1960s painting through innovation and the strong foundation of her Academy training.

Robert Cozzolino A Curator of Modern Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He received his Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006 and wrote his dissertation on the artist Ivan Albright (1897-1983). Much of his work has focused on the 1940s but he has shifted his research to the 1960s and to the period immediately following World War I. He has organized numerous exhibitions for PAFA including, Light, Line and Color: American Works on Paper 1765-2005 (2005)