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About
One of Philadelphia’s most beloved artists and teachers, Dessner was born and raised in South Philadelphia. He discovered his calling to be an artist at the age of twenty-five when taking classes at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial. After graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1965, he traveled across Europe and visited the great museums of London, Paris, Rome, and Madrid. He returned to Philadelphia, where he worked as a bartender at Dirty Frank’s, a hub of the city’s art scene. He began teaching at PAFA in 1970 and remained an instructor there until his retirement in 2012. He described being inspired by Venetian painters like Titian and Veronese, and by the light and natural beauty of the island of Patmos, Greece, which he visited frequently.
Ethereal and mesmerizing, rich in color, bold and dynamic, the paintings of Murray Dessner are recognized for their directness and beauty. There are significant phases of Dessner’s career, including his hard-edge abstractions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the vigorous poured paintings of the 1970s, the mysterious Venice- and Greece-inspired paintings of the 1980s, the figurative “memoir” paintings of the early 1990s, and the mystical atmospheric paintings that have been his focus from the mid-1990s onward.
Selected Solo & Group Exhibitions
2012 Works by Murray Dessner, Somerville Manning Gallery, Greenville, DE
2012 Murray Dessner: A Retrospective, Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA
2012 Four Visions/Four Artists, Philip and Muriel Berman Museum, Collegeville, PA
2011 Flirting with Abstraction, Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA
2009 Artists of Accomplishment from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Somerville Manning Gallery, Greenville, DE
2009 5th Biennial Exhibition of the SAI, Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA
2005 Selected Works on Paper, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
1997 Solo Exhibition, Somerville Manning Gallery, Greenville, DE
1994 The Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA
1993 Annual Juried Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
1990 Annual Juried Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
1988 Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA
1987 Annual Juried Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
1983 William Penn Museum, Harrisburg, PA
1983 Pacific University, Forest Grove, PA
1982 Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, FL
1979 Pennsylvania Invitational, General State Authority, Harrisburg, PA
1978 Artist and Teacher, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
1976 Philadelphia Museum of Art at Moore College, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA
1972 Annual Juried Exhibition, Cheltenham Art Center, Philadelphia, PA
1969 International Arts Festival Juried Exhibition, San Juan, Puerto Rico
1967 The Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA
1964 Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Selected Public Collections
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA
Cornell Fine Arts Center Museum, Winter Park, FL
Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR
Colgate University, Picker Gallery, Hamilton, NY
Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA
Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Villanova University, Villanova, PA
Widener University Law School, Wilmington, DE
Medical College of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Co., Philadelphia, PA
Morgan, Lewis and Bockius, Philadelphia, PA
Parente Randolph, Philadelphia, PA
Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, Inc., Collegeville, PA
SmithKline Corporation, Philadelphia, PA
Danella Companies, Plymouth Meeting, PA
Ballard Spahr, Wilmington, DE
General Mills Corporation, Tampa, FL
Burdine’s Stores, Miami, FL
Diplomat Hotel, Hallandale, FL
NCH/Transwest, Tucson, AZ
Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ
Atlantic Richfield Co., Philadelphia, PA
Education
1965 The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
1959 Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA
