Southern Eccentric: Paintings by Larry Connatser at the Morris Museum of Art

Written by rubin Friday, 24 April 2009 14:09

AUGUSTA, GA - Southern Eccentric: Paintings by Larry Connatser, an exhibition representing the Morris Museum’s extensive collection of work by one of Georgia’s most renowned contemporary artists, the late Larry Connatser, opens to the public at the Morris Museum of Art on May 2, 2009. This is the first time that the Morris has exhibited a selection from its holdings of hundreds of works of art by Connatser. On view though 16 August, 2009.

“We’re very pleased by this opportunity to bring the work of Larry Connatser to the attention of a larger public,” said Kevin Grogan, director of the Morris Museum of Art. “He is, without a doubt, one of the most original and inventive artists ever to have emerged from the region.”

Artist Biography - Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1938 and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Larry Connatser turned his considerable energies to painting some years after earning a degree in English literature from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. After a lengthy residence in Chicago, Illinois, where he worked in advertising, he returned to Georgia in 1971, first living in Atlanta before moving to Savannah. He developed a unique style, often using brightly colored, three-dimensional dots organized within highly intricate compositions. Though self-taught, Connatser was an avid student of art who was thoroughly informed about historical and contemporary painting. He was remarkably prolific, producing more than twenty-five hundred paintings and some eight hundred drawings by the time of his death in 1996. In 2005, the Morris Museum was given the remainder of his estate, creating the largest collection of his work in a public institution. He is also represented in the collections of Savannah’s Telfair Museum of Art, which organized a major retrospective exhibition of his paintings in 2002, and the Savannah College of Art and Design, as well as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and numerous corporate and private collections. He is particularly noted for public murals that he executed for MARTA in Atlanta where they are seen daily by hundreds of thousands of commuters.

First incorporated as a nonprofit foundation in 1985, the Morris Museum of Art was established by William S. Morris III in memory of his parents William Shivers Morris, Jr,. and Florence Hill Morris.

The purchase in 1989 of 230 paintings from the collection of Robert P. Coggins, a renowned collector of Southern art, established a focus and direction for the museum. Parts of Coggins's vast collection had been exhibited in museums around the country, and several other public institutions were vying for it when the purchase was made on behalf of the nascent Morris Museum. Another significant development of that year was the establishment of a reference library, which has evolved into the Center for the Study of Southern Art, an important reference resource.

Southern Eccentric: Paintings by Larry Connatser remains on view in the Morris Museum of Art’s Coggins Gallery through August 16, 2009. For more information, please visit the museum’s web site at www.themorris.org .

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