NEW ORLEANS, LA.- The Ogden Museum of Southern Art announces its presentation of Arthur Kern: The Surreal World of a Reclusive Sculptor.

Arthur Kern, a retired Tulane Professor of Art, all but withdrew from the outside world thirty years ago. Since then, he has spent much of his time working in his basement studio, creating scores of surreal sculptures that disturb as often as they enchant. Kern's subjects are horses and people, distorted in sometimes fanciful, sometimes macabre ways. His inspiration flows from his unconscious and can therefore be somewhat difficult to fathom, even for the artist himself. Kern has never had much interest in exhibiting or selling his sculptures, and as a result they have accumulated on shelves and table tops in the Uptown New Orleans house he shares with his wife of sixty years.

The exhibition is guest curated by John Berendt, who divides his time between New York and New Orleans, and is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The City of Falling Angels. Berendt has delved deeply into Kern’s process to craft this exhibition, spending hours interviewing the artist in his home to better understand this complex work.

"It was an exhilarating moment, walking into Arthur Kern's place that day and discovering forty years of his sculptures arrayed throughout the house on shelves and table tops,” said Berendt, “there were dozens of them, every one uniquely memorable, even haunting--the elegantly surreal horses, the distorted faces peering through lenses and making bizarre eye-contact with the viewer. Kern's sculptures merge the beautiful and the grotesque in strangely seductive ways. I left his house that day thinking, 'People really ought to see these things!'"