The European Union in the United States

| exhibition
Paintings by Alice Mavrogordato

Each summer, the Wintergreen Performing Arts Festival presents national and international performers. The theme for the 2010 festival is Vienna. The festival is going to feature over 200 events over a period of four weeks and the Austrian Cultural Forum Washington is going to be represented with the documentary exhibition Vienna Café 1900, and with a diversity of artworks by Austrian-American painter Alice Mavrogordato from the collection of works of the Austrian Embassy.

Born in Vienna in 1916, Alice Mavrogordato began to paint when she was a child, and was the recipient of a children’s scholarship at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. Her pursuit of the arts was stalled by personal difficulties and world events. In 1938, she lost her job in Vienna because of her Jewish origins. Several attempts to flee to Italy were unsuccessful, but in 1939 she finally managed to emigrate to Great Britain. She survived World War II, but spent nearly two years incarcerated in an internment camp on the Isle of Man. After that she went on to work for the American army as a translator at the Nuremberg War Trials, where she met her future husband, Ralph Mavrogordato. In 1951, they emigrated to the United States.

In Washington, DC, she began to paint again, and studied with Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis at the Workshop Center for the Arts. Her works were presented at a New Faces show at the Franz Bader Gallery in 1957, and she had her first solo show at Collector’s Corner in 1958. In 1959, she founded the Origo Gallery in collaboration with other abstract expressionists such as Tom Downing, Lowell Nesbitt, Elisabeth Pajak and Howard Mehring, and established herself firmly in the art scene of Washington, DC. In the years that followed, her paintings were featured at a large number of solo and group shows. The Embassy of Austria in Washington, DC, devoted a retrospective to her works in 1997.

Her body of work consists mostly of large-scale paintings in oil, as well as smaller formats, which she created using mixed media and collage techniques. Her style of painting has been identified with the Washington “Color School” of painting.

Opening Hours:
Exhibition Opening – Wednesday, July 21 from 4:00-6:00 pm
Thursday, July 22 from 3:00-6:00 pm
Friday, July 23 from 3:00-6:00 pm
Saturday July 24 from 10:00 am-6:00 pm
Sunday, July 25 from 12:00-3:00 pm
Thursday, July 29 from 3:00-6:00 pm
Friday, July 30 from 3:00-6:00 pm
Saturday July 31 from 10:00 am-6:00 pm