Estate of Andrew Forge [1923 - 2002]
Dates: January 18, 2007 – February 17, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 18, 6 – 8 pm
Hours of Operation: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm
…it seemed to me that all I had to do was to somehow maintain that level of reality, so each mark that I made had to be as real and as vivid as I could make it.
Andrew Forge, Interview with Jacopo Benci and Silvia Stucky, 891, Rome, Italy, 1985
On Thursday, January 18th, 2007, Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to open an exhibition of the work of Andrew Forge. The exhibit will be a comprehensive view of his late work, including approximately 12 paintings and 12 works on paper.
Andrew Forge was born in Kent, England and spent much of his early career exhibiting and teaching in London. In the 1970’s, he moved to the United States where he began exhibiting extensively in New York. Additionally, he served as dean and was a professor at the Yale University School of Art for nearly two decades. His work can be seen in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Yale University, New Haven, CT, Tate Gallery, London, England, the Arts Council of Great Britain, England, among others. Awards include: John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 1980, The American Academy of Arts and Institute of Letters, Painting Prize, 1990, Distinguished Teaching of Art Award, College Art Association, 1995.
The exhibition features pieces dating from the 1970’s to his death in 2002. The paintings of Forge “stand as poetic meditations on the process of perception” so wrote Lisa Russell in 2001, in the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of Forge’s paintings at the Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College. As such the paintings are at once abstract and empirical.
In addition to his distinct artistic style, Forge is also celebrated as a writer. He is best known for his writings on Degas, Monet, Manet and Rauschenberg, all for whom he authored or contributed to books.
Click for full press release.
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.
