In this erotically charged painting, two men stand in identical poses emulating Michelangelo’s David—one facing the viewer, the other turned away. Erlebacher was inspired by Renaissance drawing manuals that illustrated front and back views of the same figure. Though drawn from models of different races and body types, the men encounter each other as equals, each walking the path of life. Their casual nudity and open body language evoke a mythic time and space where, as the artist stated, “we are the same despite superficial differences.”
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Erlebacher earned a BA in industrial design and an MFA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She and her husband, Walter Erlebacher, taught at Pratt until 1966, at which time the couple relocated to Philadelphia, each of them having accepted a teaching position at the Philadelphia College of Art (later the University of the Arts). Erlebacher taught at the University of the Arts and later at the New York Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in the collections of Woodmere, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and many others.
