News Release

Vincent Desiderio, widely known as one of the most interesting representational painters working today, will deliver the fifth annual Eugene Leake Visiting Artist's Lecture at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, April 3, in Room 101 of the F. Ross Jones Building, Mattin Center, on Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St. in Baltimore.

A digital projection lecture, "Aspects of Narrativity: Vincent Desiderio Paintings 1977-2006," will look at the "hidden exchanges" between painters and the work of their predecessors and how narrative emerges through technique in Desiderio's paintings.

The artist's repeated themes and motifs, which often appear in perplexing narratives of great psychological complexity, strike at the intellect and heart: art history (often manifested in piles of books open to paintings), human intimacy, heroic behavior, and perhaps most viscerally, the plight of Desiderio's disabled son, Sam.

In The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century, critic Donald Kuspit writes: "Desiderio is not just a painter, but what Baudelaire called a poet-painter — a painter who is able to condense into a single hallucinatory work a contradictory variety of emotions and ideas, in a way that makes it clear that painting has a unique power of subliminal, imaginative communication. ...Thus, virtually every one of his paintings shows, somewhere in it — somewhere quite central — an uneasy truce or standoff between the experience of art and the experience of life."

Vincent Desiderio was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He studied at Haverford College and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he now teaches. He has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and won the Grand Prize at the 30th Annual Show of Contemporary Art in Monte Carlo, Monaco, in 1996, the first American to do so. His works have been acquired for the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is represented by the Marlborough Gallery in New York. Desiderio lives and works in New York's Hudson Valley.

The Eugene Leake Visiting Artist's Lecture is sponsored by the Homewood Art Workshops and Homewood Arts Programs. Admission is free and open to the public. For information, call 410-516-6705. To download images of Desiderio's work, visit www.jhu.edu/artwork/desiderio.html.

Related Links
Desiderio's page on the Marlborough Gallery Web site
Desiderio monograph on Amazon.com