Postcards from the Real / Josephine Haden

Postcards from the Real, an exhibition of paintings by

Josephine Haden

October 23, 2009 - Feb. 15, 2010 

@

The Richmond International Airport

Richmond, VA USA

Josephine Haden, Stairway to Heaven, 36 x 66 inches

acrylic on canvas

Haden is a Virginia artist and the winner of a 2009 VMFA Fellowship. Her paintings are included in public and private collections in the U.S. and France, including the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Ark.

"The magic moment is to finish a piece and like what you see," says Haden. "Starting with landscapes, I found myself creating mysterious and distant places that hovered on the edge of reality," Haden says. "Filling the canvas with lush vegetation and dense forests, I played with scale and space while relying on a base ground of gestural abstraction."

She calls her latest series of works "Globalization," meaning that everything is fair game when she composes a painting, and she says she "beams them in" from some other place, from some other story or scene. "My intention is to create delight and intrigue."

Critic Donald Kuspit calls Haden an "eloquent" painter and a realist of sorts. "I say ‘of sorts' because there's an aura of eeriness to her reality, however precisely (always precisely) rendered - but her images are also abstract, which no doubt adds to their uncanniness." Kuspit is the distinguished professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and professor of art history at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

Haden studied art and art history as an undergraduate at Georgetown University and earned a master's degree in art history from George Washington University. Both schools are in the District of Columbia. Her solo exhibition, Postcards from the Real, at The Richmond International Airport is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is an educational institution of the Commonwealth of Virginia. For additional information about exhibitions and programs, telephone (804) 340-1400 or visit the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Web site, www.vmfa.museum.

Richmond International Airport is the gateway for Virginia's Capital Region and offers more than 180 daily, non-stop flights.

J O S E P H I N E   H A D E N
www.hadenart.com