UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Arts and Architecture’s School of Visual Arts will continue its annual Anderson Lecture Series by welcoming artist Edgar Orlaineta on Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 11:30 a.m. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Foster Auditorium located in the Paterno Library at University Park and on Zoom.
The lecture series is supported by the John Muller Anderson endowment, which was named in honor of the professor emeritus who was an Evan Pugh research professor of philosophy and the first director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Orlaineta, who lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico, focuses on hybrid sculptural forms that draw inspiration from modernism, popular culture and specific historic moments. Orlaineta primarily explores post-war design and architecture that generally depicted biomorphic shapes owing to strong surrealist influence.
In his original works, the artist questions the symbolic and economic value of industrial design objects, which began as mass-produced products and later evolved into coveted collector’s items, by either incorporating craft elements or combining them into assemblages with everyday objects that lack any historical relevance.
In his interventions and assemblages, Orlaineta seeks to open these design objects to new perspectives through denial of their functionality, historical or cult value in order to reactivate the legacy of the historical avant-garde.
“Recently, my inquiry has deepened into the epistemological and embodied dimensions of craftsmanship. I am particularly concerned with reclaiming the poetics that envelop the creative act — those moments both preceding and succeeding its material manifestation,” Orlaineta explained in an artist statement. “My intention is to reassert the poetic condition as central to artistic creation and, by extension, to the experience of life itself.”