THE ARTIST AND HIS ART

frederic C. kaplan

A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he is a current faculty member, Frederic Kaplan has exhibited at museums, institutions and galleries along the east coast. His art has earned numerous awards and is included in many museum, corporate, and private collections. Before turning to fine art in the 1990s, he was a successful illustrator and designer. In addition to his busy exhibition schedule, Mr. Kaplan offers classes and workshops at art schools and art centers in the Philadelphia region.

Kaplan’s art reflects his observations of human activity and interactions. Often autobiographical, his images are erected on a framework influenced by physics and cosmology, which he became interested in as a teenager. “After reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time in the late 1980s,” explains the artist, “I became a physics addict, reading everything I could get my hands on. Inevitably, the things I was reading about found their way into my art.”

Two main bodies of work have emerged as a result of Kaplan's fascination with physics: his Genesis paintings and his Relativity pictures.

The term “genesis” comes from the Greek word for “beginning.” Kaplan’s Genesis pictures portray the soup of the universe at the moment it erupted into existence and its subsequent early expansion. His Relativity imagery focuses on light, time, and gravity and is influenced primarily by Albert Einstein’s relativity theories.

In summing up his work, Kaplan states, “The Genesis paintings tell the story of how we and our universe came to be, and the Relativity pictures describe what it has become.”