University News

Michael Reedy Art Exhibit at the WIU Gallery

March 24, 2017

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MACOMB, IL – Michael Reedy's "Time and Folly" painting will be on display at Western Illinois University's Art Gallery March 20-April 20.

Reedy graduated from North Central College in Illinois and received a BFA Cum Laude and an MFA from Northern Illinois University. Being in over 150 exhibitions, Reedy is nationally known and recognized as a revolutionary artist. He is known for is depiction of the human body and transformations it goes throughout the entirety of one's life. His art is inspired from his interpretations through cartooning and medical illustration.

"The delicate strands of white hair that have started to populate my wife's head most easily explain what motivates my work," said Reedy. "At one moment, I find them incredibly beautiful, and celebrate the fact that I have had the opportunity to share my life with her, and in another moment, I am struck with my fear of growing older and eventually losing her. Everything eventually seems to revolve around this point-of-tension between beauty and despair, between living and dying. My hope has been, that by employing a range of pictorial conventions (medical illustration, op art, classical nudes, etc.) I could blur the contentious boundaries between life and death, personhood and object, and the beautiful and the ugly; laying one on top of the others like a series of scripts that can be read simultaneously. I enjoy the complex range of emotions that results, where beauty, love, pain, loss, and despair seem entwined and inseparable. However, it is our ability to persevere in light of this duality that motivates much of my work – and it should be stressed that I prefer to find the beauty in that silver hair. The characters that populate my work are only flirting with death – even the skeletons and skull portraits are very much living in my mind."

This exhibit is open free to the public.

To view more of Reedy's work, visit michaelreedy.gallery.

For more information on the event visit, wiu.edu/cofac/artgallery/exhibitions.php.

Posted By: Nicholas Doty (WIUNews@wiu.edu)
Office of University Communications & Marketing