READING, PA.- Gary Erbe (American, b. 1944) has been painting the theme of the American Flag in his still life compositions for over fifty years. In the lead up to the Nation’s Bicentennial in 1976, the artist set out to commemorate the achievement in two monumental canvases. Those works are included in this fifty-year retrospective titled, Gary Erbe: Magical World. The engaging exhibition includes fifty works—both paintings and finished assemblages (models for the paintings) —with more than a dozen that feature the American flag. The American flag is a particularly timely subject as the nation celebrates its Semiquincentennial, marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The exhibition will be on view at the Reading Public Museum in the Jerome Marcus American Art Gallery and the Irvin and Lois Cohen Modern and Contemporary Gallery through August 2, 2026.
Above all, Erbe has been celebrated for his innovative contributions to still life and trompe l’oeil (fool the eye) painting, a genre rooted in the tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realism. The current exhibition’s title is suitable, since to witness the artist’s unique body of work, both his complex and strategically planned assemblages and his highly polished oil painting, is to truly step into a distinctly separate realm, where the familiarity of the objects depicted is somehow subverted by surprising and mysterious juxtapositions.
Curator Scott Schweigert noted that, “Erbe’s art stands at a crossroads of tradition and innovation. He has a remarkable ability to bridge memory, nostalgia, and innovation in his paintings. Through his painstaking, methodical technique, and complex compositions, Erbe helps redefine trompe l’oeil, not as a relic of the past, but as a living, evolving form that has relevance to today’s viewer and, more broadly, to contemporary life.”
Erbe, who is a self-taught artist, started his career in the visual arts as an engraver in the mid-1960s. He took a bold leap in the early 1970s, becoming a full-time, independent artist, operating a studio in in Union City New Jersey from 1972 to 2006 and Nutley from 2006 to present.
He began exhibiting his work regionally and nationally winning medals—many of them gold—in juried exhibitions. His paintings have entered the collections of major institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Phillips Collection, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among many others.
Gary Erbe: Magical World debuted at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio from January 25 through March 29, 2026 and will travel to the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana from August 22-October 25, 2026. An 88-page illustrated catalogue accompanies this exhibition.
