Robert Feintuch, a member of the Bates College studio art faculty who is celebrated for his droll, evocative paintings, has received a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship.

The New York City-based John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation this year awarded 190 fellowships to artists, scientists and scholars. According to the foundation’s Web site, Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment.

Individual grants in 2008 averaged $43,000, with awards totaling over $8 million.A resident of New York City, Feintuch will use the Guggenheim to support the creation of a body of work for his next exhibition at New York’s CRG Gallery in 2009.

“As both a vital, expressive painter and someone who knows intimately the demands of a career in creative work, Robert is a valuable teacher and mentor to our students and faculty,” says Jill Reich, dean of the faculty at Bates.

“We are delighted that he has this support that provides him time to reflect and hone his creative edge.”

A senior lecturer in the art and visual culture department at Bates, Feintuch is known for “an extraordinary kind of realist painting that is both conceptual and figurative,” as Artnet.com reviewer David Ebony described it. Feintuch hands his faceless, undressed figures ordinary or comic objects that become mysterious and suggestive in the context of the pictures.

He explains that unbroken stretches of concentrated painting enable him to make his best work. “When I’m working well and I’ve had enough time in the studio, I feel immersed in the stream of images I find, and one begins to lead to another,” he says.

Feintuch has an M.F.A. from Yale University and a B.F.A. from Cooper Union. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art Forum, ARTnews and Flash Art.

He has shown work in galleries including CRG, the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, and such overseas venues as the Studio La Citta in Verona, Italy, and Galerie Alfred Kren in Cologne, Germany. Feintuch has also participated in group exhibitions including “Figuration” at the Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano, Italy, and “I Love You More Than My Own Death” at the Venice Biennale.

Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded more than $265 million in fellowships to more than 16,000 individuals — among them such figures as Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott, James Watson and Eudora Welty.

Previous Guggenheim recipients with a Bates connection include William Pope.L, a senior lecturer in the theater department and a nationally known conceptual artist, and William Stringfellow, a member of the Class of 1949 known as a peace activist, human rights lawyer and theologian.

Twelve art majors cap their Bates College careers with the popular Annual Senior Exhibition, opening with a reception at 7 p.m. Friday, April 9. The exhibit at the Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell St., runs through May 30 and is open to the public at no charge.

The exhibition highlights work selected from the thesis projects of graduating seniors majoring in studio art. The program emphasizes the creation of a cohesive body of related works through sustained studio practice and critical inquiry. The yearlong process is overseen during the fall semester by Assistant Professor of Art Pamela Johnson, and during the winter semester by Senior Lecturer in Art Robert Feintuch, who also curates the exhibit and oversees its installation.

In alphabetical order, here are the exhibiting artists:

Julia Allen of St. Paul, Minn., has made cups, bowls and vases of porcelain, exploring varying degrees of distortion in order to find forms that imply fluid motion.

Sarita Fellows of Natick, Mass., has used Nigerian printed fabric as a source of inspiration for intensely colored abstract paintings and etchings.

Jon Greer of Chester, N.H., has worked with abstraction, space and light in his monochromatic paintings of fragmented images of the figure.

Using manipulated and anthropomorphic forms, Paul Heckler of Cross River, N.Y., has made a group of high-fired reduction stoneware teapots.

Alison Locke of Troy, Maine, has done a group of paintings of Martha Stewart that evoke journalistic photography and address Stewart’s multifaceted and controversial image.

Working with images of furniture, Graham Macbeth of Ellsworth, Maine, has made paintings and monotypes that play with ideas of geometric abstraction and representation.

Meredith Nutting of Rockville, Md., has used forms found in tree branches as the basis of abstract paintings that explore color interaction and spatial relationships.

Helen O’Donnell of Mount Desert, Maine, has used etching and drypoint to make images that combine handwritten text, abstract imagery and cartoons, and that question traditional ideas of content and meaning.

Through her work in ceramics, Caitlin Reiter of Mystic, Conn., investigates textured surface patterns in a series of monochromatic functional forms that are hybrids of bowls and trays.

In digital photographs that stress color, Elizabeth Sall of Villanova, Pa., shows still-lifes that she found in domestic situations.

Annie Schauer of Louisville, Ky., has made black-and-white photographs of interiors and landscapes that evoke notions of absence and presence.

K-Fai Steele of Charlton, Mass., is interested in the intersection of banality, humor and awe. Her work in the fall semester culminated in the large-scale installation Me and Jesus in the Perry Atrium. Her more recent work uses a structure inspired by dollhouses.

The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and is closed Sundays and major holidays. For additional information call 207-786-6158.

A member of the  Bates art faculty whose work has received prominent exhibitions in America and Europe, Robert Feintuch discusses his paintings at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 14, in Room 104, Olin Arts Center.

Based in New York, Feintuch achieves a clarity and brightness that, paradoxically, deepen the mystery of his images. His best-known works include self-portraits set in cryptic, sometimes humorous, circumstances that find the artist particularly vulnerable — asleep, nude or literally with his pants down.

“Many of these images could be moments in a narrative sequence selected from quotidian, lived life,” stated the catalog for Feintuch’s 2001 solo exhibition at the Howard Yezerski Gallery, in Boston. “But the cropping and stillness of the compositions, and [their] luminosity . . . make it clear that the images are metaphorically open and psychologically suggestive.”

Feintuch has exhibited his work at the CRG Gallery in New York, the Jewish Museum in San Francisco and the Venice Biennale, as well as galleries and museums in Cologne, Germany, and Verona and Bologna, Italy, among other venues.

Sponsored by the Bates College Museum of Art, this event is free and open to the public. For more information about the lecture, please call 207-786-6158.