WERRING CONTEMPORARY
Maureen Drdak is a Philadelphia-based artist whose practice draws from extensive travel and research across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, Nepal, and the Himalayas. Her work explores universal mythic archetypes, blending ancient and contemporary forces into a singular visual language.
A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of the Arts, Drdak received the prestigious 2011 U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar Award for Art in Nepal. Her Fulbright research, The Prakriti Project, pioneered the first synthesis of repoussé metalwork and contemporary painting—a hallmark of her current work—for which she studied with the greatest living family of this practice, the descendants of historic master Kuber Singh Shakya.
She received personal support from H. F. Lenfest and Eugene V. Thaw for Lung-Ta, an interdisciplinary collaboration with composer Dr. Andrea Clearfield inspired by the Tibetan Kingdom of Lo. Their work premiered at the University of the Arts (2009) and the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel (2012).
Drdak’s work is held in institutional, university and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. Her work has been exhibited in forty-seven solo, group, and international arts festivals. Collections include those of Berthe and John Ford, Lynda and Stuart Resnick, the James A. Michener Art Museum, the Berman Museum of Art, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Forthcoming recognition includes her award of the historic Philadelphia Sketch Club Medal, and the permanent collection acquisition of Inner Perceiver 7 by The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.