LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ -- A two person exhibition of paintings by Harry I. Naar and Deborah Rosenthal, professors of art at Rider University, begins in the University Art Gallery on October 22 and continues through November 23, 1997.

This exhibition, titled "The Faculty Paints: Two Points of View," will include approximately 20 recent works, including oil, acrylic, watercolor, and pastel paintings.

Dr. Naar will show still-lifes in acrylic with mysteriously animated hats, shells, and fruit, some set against a window view to the outdoors, as well as landscape watercolors done directly from the motif on a recent sabbatical trip to Italy.

Dr. Rosenthal's metaphoric abstract paintings pose rather fantastical, androgynous figures -- singly and in pairs -- within linear frameworks or planes of overlapping, hanging densities. In her pastels, she studies plant forms and their decorative qualities.

Dr. Naar, a resident of Lawrenceville and director of the University Art Gallery, has taught at Rider since 1980. He is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art with an M.F.A. from Indiana University, and has studied with the French painter Jean Hélion in Paris. Dr. Naar's work has been shown nationally and internationally in forums such as the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and the USSR Artist Union Gallery in Moscow. His work is included in corporate, private, and museum collections such as the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, the Morris Museum of Arts and Sciences, Johnson & Johnson, and Bristol Myers-Squibb. He has curated a wide-range of one-person and group exhibitions, and is listed in the publication Who's Who in American Art.

Dr. Rosenthal, a New York artist, came to Rider in 1989, having taught at Parsons, the Kansas City Art Institute, Queens College, and Stanford. She is represented by the Bowery Gallery in New York City, where she has had five solo exhibitions. Dr. Rosenthal's work has been included in many group exhibitions in New York and elsewhere, and is included in both public and private collections. A well-known writer on art who received an NEA Critic's Grant in 1980, she has published articles in two books and in such magazines as Art in America, The New Criterion, The College Art Journal, Modern Painters, Artforms, and Arts.

A reception for the artists will be held on Thursday, October 30, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the gallery. Regular hours for the gallery, which is located in the Student Center on Rider's Lawrenceville campus and open to the public, are 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

For further information on the exhibit, contact Dr. Naar at (609) 896-5588 or Dr. Rosenthal at (609) 896-5589.

Rider University's Lawrenceville campus is located five miles south of Princeton and three miles north of Trenton on Route 206 in Lawrence Township, NJ. The campus is one-half mile south of exit 7A of Interstate 95.