WORLD RENOWNED SECOND WAVE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST ARTIST FAY LANSNER SHOWS A LIFETIME OF PAINTINGS AT LARCHMONT’S PGARTVENTURE GALLERY JUNE 13, 2008

Co-founder of Women in the Arts and a member of The Hamptons’ artistic community for six decades , FayLansner’s work has been exhibited in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and in museums and galleries across the U.S. and in France.

Pgartventure Gallery in Larchmont, New York is exhibiting a retrospective of groundbreaking feminist artist Fay Lansner June 13 through July 4 2008 . Lansner and her family will attend the opening on June 13 at 6 p.m., which will include a tribute to the legendary artist whose work spans sixty years.

Throughout her career, Lansner has used a variety of media including paint on canvas, tapestries, pastels and collages incorporating poems written by poet Barbara Guest, to explore the female human form. Over time, the scale of her work expanded until she was painting life-size figures.

“I was exploring my identity, and in many ways I did this through pictures,” Lansner said. “When I thought of the past I thought of my mother…when I thought of the future I thought of my children, and there I was the central actor in this terrible female drama.”

Such thoughts influenced Lansner’s “Past, Present, Future” a painting that displays a modern version of Klimt’s TheThree Ages of Women.

In 1971, Lansner co-founded Women in the Arts (WIA), an organization seeking to change both public and institutional attitudes toward women artists. In 1972, group members demonstrated in front of the Museum of Modern Art protesting discriminatory curatorial practices. The landmark Women Choose Women show of works by 109 women artists opened shortly after the protest at the New York Cultural Center in 1973. Poet Barbara Guest said of Lansner “I believe it is necessary in looking at the artist’s work to be aware of her background, because the elements which are gathered into her painting are all there in her past.”

The daughter of Russian Jews who escaped tsarist Russia and settled in Philadelphia, Lansner began her art education at the Tyler School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She moved to New York City in 1948 where she studied with Hans Hoffman and at The Art Students League. There she married journalist Kermit Lansner, who went on to become editor of Newsweek. Later she studied in Paris under the direction of Fernand Leger and Andre Lhote. She worked for many years in the 10 th Street Studio Building and showed at the Hansa, Kornblee and Phoenix Galleries, as well as in the Hamptons with fellow artists including Miriam Shapiro, De Kooning and Larry Rivers.