Andrew Forge
The Limits of Sight
June 1 – July 30, 2021
Andrew Forge was born in Kent, England in 1923. He exhibited in the United States upon his arrival here in the 1970’s through his death in 2002. Forge served as dean of the Yale University School of Art and was a professor there for nearly two decades. His work can be found in numerous public collections, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Yale University, New Haven, CT; Tate Gallery, London, England; and the Arts Council of Great Britain.
He was the recipient of numerous awards: a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 1980; The American Academy of Arts and Letters Painting Prize, 1990; and a Distinguished Teaching of Art Award, College Art Association, 1995.
For full biography click below.
By John Yau
The English-born painter Andrew Forge (1923–2002) could have continued along the respectable path that he had established for himself by 1950, when he started teaching painting and drawing at the Slade School in London. From 1964–70, he was head of the Department of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and in 1971–72, he was a lecturer in the Department of Art at the University of Reading. In addition to teaching, he became a highly regarded writer on art and began exhibiting his observational paintings, which were well received by critics. In 1964, he had a 10-year retrospective at City Art Gallery, in Bristol, England.
By Andrew Shea
As a young painter in high school I became interested in Josef Albers, the Bauhaus artist and educator whose seminal color course, outlined in his 1963 book Interaction of Color, transformed the pedagogy of modern design in the second half of the twentieth century. Albers’s basic hypothesis, which he aimed to prove to his students and readers through one perceptual experiment after another, is that a color has no independent value, but rather is relative in the way that a musical tone is. What gives a B-flat its power is not its specific frequency but its harmonic, intervallic relationship to the other notes in a chord or melody. When it comes to making a picture, this slippery relativity can be maddening at times—try and mix up that tree trunk’s brownish-gray on your palette and watch it mutate into some ungodly splotch once it’s placed on the canvas—but it’s also a primary source of painting’s magic. Albers once likened his tinkering to alchemy: “I like to take a weak color and make it rich and beautiful by working on its neighbors. . . . Turning sand into gold, that’s my work and aim.”
The Critic's Notebook
By Andrew Shea
"'Forge’s paintings must be seen, in actuality. No reproduction, whether conventional or digital, no matter how technologically advanced, can capture their essential and distinctive qualities. And they must be studied for extended periods.'” Having spent an hour or so with the paintings last week, I can report that this is true."
Andrew Forge Well, it’s a long story… As you know, since I started working with dots I’ve been very interested in the way in which the dot itself seems to invite different doings, in a sense. You want to look at them close, you want to see what the dots are doing when you got your nose stuck in them, then you want to stand back and see what they do at a distance… .
Painter David Carbone explores the affinities between painter and composer provoked by visiting Forge’s show at Betty Cuningham this summer (June 4 to August 14, 2015) and hearing Feldman’s Neither at New York City Opera several years earlier.
Andrew Forge was an influential painter and teacher for years at Yale among other places. His influence was formative for me and I know for many others as well. An ideal tribute to his memory would be a sprawling museum show of his work and the work of artists he influenced, since that's not in my power; I reached out to artists who have generously shared their memories and work below. If you're in New York this December, you can see a couple of Andrew's paintings as they demand to be seen, in the flesh, at The Betty Cuningham Gallery The show is called, "It's Magic!" a group exhibition of works by Andrew Forge, William Bailey, Rackstraw Downes, Jake Berthot, Forrest Bess, Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi, John Elderfield, Alison Wilding, and Christopher Wilmarth, December 10 - January 10, 2015 with an opening reception on Saturday, December 13th from 4 -7 pm.
Walking into my favorite gallery can be like stepping into grandma’s kitchen when the oven’s on. Something’s cooking, I don’t know what it is, but chances are I’m going to like it. In New York, I depend on a dozen or so galleries for such comfort food. These are the galleries that know what I want before I want it.
The geographies vary—from Chelsea, to SoHo, to the Upper East Side—but the consistency of vision and the strength of personality keep these galleries on the tip of my tongue and in the front of my mind. From the rank novice to the seasoned expert, the secret of the gallery scene is to find places you like and to stick with them. What follows are three of my personal favorites.
Coming as I do from London, where the sidewalks are called “pavements” and are made of neatly joined, level flagstones, the roughly poured, broken, unpatterned concrete that one walks on in New York is always affecting. My sense of the whole city is colored by that thin, random seeming covering, a mere temporary shell thrown over the sand and mud which the ancient rocks that jut out of the grass in Central Park seem savagely to ignore. These fissured, pitted sidewalks are treacherous. I keep my eyes down. At the same time I am surrounded by buildings and an ever‐changing panorama of reflections. Clouds and sunlight are inverted below the skyline. Roads of light open between the buildings. I am in a state of constant tension between up and down. The juxtaposition throws up a wholly unfamiliar view of man’s works. And an unfamiliar view of myself. The city seems open, provisional, the luxurious and ramshackle upshot of certain freedoms which, in my European experience, are nothing but states of mind, or longing, and have no material presence – unless perhaps in childhood memories of treehouses, dammed streams, and improvised blockhouses under the kitchen table.
