Martha Mayer Erlebacher
"Painting, like myth, is as ancient and primal as the caves. It functions in a timeless dimension of profound stillness. It is the stillness that can encompass the perfect tranquility of Piero della Francisca and a stark decapitation in Caravaggio. Within this unmoving center we may confront our inner world at close range. It is Martha Erlebacher’s ambition to delineate the elemental with the still intimacy of painting."
— From Disquieting Beauty, introduction to the Erlebacher catalog by John Nava
Martha Mayer Erlebacher’s remarkable painting career spans thirty-five years. With over twenty one-person exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles, Ms. Erlebacher has defined a painting vision rich in metaphor and compositional structure. Since the 1970s, she has painted fruit, eggs, pots, vases and a variety of other objects in a realistic style and also paints Renaissance-like figures, primarily portraits and the female nude. Her oil paintings feature warm colors and her drawings subtle changes of value.
Her 1998 exhibition of mythic figurative tableaus pushed her content from the classical to the primal. She is renowned for her extensive background in anatomy, historical painting techniques and the literature of realist painting.
Erlebacher earned her MFA from Pratt Institute and is now Chair of the Faculty at the New York Academy of Art in Manhattan.
Her paintings have been exhibited and collected nationally and abroad, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. She has received numerous honors and awards, including an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant, a Mellon Venture Fund Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in the Visual. The Fischbach Gallery in New York City, the More Gallery in Philadelphia, the Hackett-Freedman Gallery in San Francisco, J. Rosenthal Fine Arts, Ltd. In Chicago and the Koplin Gallery in Santa Monica all represent her work.
