Norris Embry - Four Decades of Work Norris Embry

A selection of paintings, mixed medi works on paper and monotypes, spanning four decades, will be the subject of a Norris Embry Exhibition at Snyder Fone Art from November 9 through December 9, 1995. Included in the exhibition will be rarely seen, early works on loan from the collection of Salomon R. Guggenheim museum.

Embry's work has mos recently been explored in the context of "insider" / "outsider"art, was included in the exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Ousider Art" Although Embry is considered an insider by virtue of his art school training and art world involvement, there is a compulsive, visionary aspect to his work, evidenced by its diary-like character and highly charged psychological imagery (Embry was troubled with mental illness thoughout his lige and was diagnosed as schizophrenic). Embry occupies a place right on the edge of "insider" and "outsider" art and his work brings to the forefront the complex relationship between artistic genius and mental illness.

In the catalogue preface to Norris Embry's 1975 exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Tom Freudenheim wrote, "The power of Norris Embry's work derives from its obsessive quality, which is transmitted by a single painting no less than by a view his immense output.