SINCE HIS ART days in the heady environment of late-1940s New York, Robert Slutzky, professor of fine arts at Penn since 1990, has been exploring geometric abstraction in his work as a painter, educator, and architectural designer and theorist. An exhibition of more than two dozen of his canvases is on display in Penn’s Arthur Ross Gallery April 18-May 31, 1998. The exhibition covers some 50 years of work, including Slutzky’s latest series of paintings, begun in 1996 and never before exhibited, that “evoke the gyroscopic calibrations of a satellite hovering above the earth or a tightrope walker’s vertiginous field of vision.”