PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will present Sidney Goodman: Man in the Mirror, the first major exhibition of the artist’s works on paper, from June 26 - September 20, 2009 in the Annenberg Gallery of the Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building.

Since the 1960s, Sidney Goodman has played a significant role in maintaining the vitality of figurative art in the United States. Making the figure in the modern urban landscape his subject matter, he has developed an approach that fuses images from life, photography, and the media into compositions that are both arresting and disquieting. Setting him apart from other figurative painters of his generation, such as Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz, Goodman’s work has always maintained an air of mystery verging on the metaphysical. As early as 1963, Time Magazine described Goodman’s paintings as “stemming from the most humdrum of sights, which he transforms into an image that seems to have endless ramifications and is always part of a mystery.”

“Goodman’s works on paper are a central and powerful part of his work and over the years he has created a body of drawings, gouaches, and watercolors that explore the innermost aspects of the human condition,” says Julien Robson, PAFA’s curator of Contemporary Art. “They result from collaging images culled from the media and from a personal archive of photos and sketches whose subject matter encompasses birth and death, aggression and sensuality, love and compassion.”

Man in the Mirror consists of more than 60 drawings and watercolors the artist has made since 1980. In large- and small-scale works, the exhibition explores the way that Goodman uses and combines memory, imagination, and observation to explore the full range of human emotions.

Born in Philadelphia, Sidney oodman studied at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) from 1954-58, and taught there from 1960 to 1978. In 1962 he was included in his first major museum show, Recent Paintings USA: The Figure, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and subsequently has been exhibited widely, including a major overview of his work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1995. Goodman has been a member of the faculty at PAFA since 1979 and lives and works in Philadelphia.