Fairfield University Art Museum Announces Andrew Forge: Limits of

Fairfield University Art Museum Announces Andrew Forge: Limits of Sight

On view September 25 – December 19, 2020.

FAIRFIELD, CT — Fairfield University Art Museum announces the upcoming exhibition Andrew Forge: Limits of Sight opening in the museum’s Bellarmine Hall Galleries on September 25 and closing December 19, 2020. Curated by scholar and guest curator Karen Wilkin, the exhibition will feature over twenty-five paintings and works on paper by British artist Andrew Forge (1923-2002). Forge was a painter and an influential art critic, as well professor and then the dean of the Yale University School of Art from 1975-1994. His highly personal abstractions distill his perceptions of place, season, and time of day into subtle orchestrations of pure color.

Wilkin writes about Andrew Forge in the exhibition brochure: “We must look long and carefully at these complex sheets of multiple, intermingled hues, if we are to come to terms with their subtlety and richness, but even when we do, we always feel that something has escaped us. Their spatial mobility and their sense of pulsing light combine to make the dot paintings both irresistible and elusive. They appear to test the limits of sight. We yield to the allure of their atmospheric orchestrations of color yet we are not quite certain that we are really perceiving them. Pools and pathways of chromatic harmonies become visible with prolonged looking and then subside into the all-over fabric of dots. When we view the paintings from a distance, hints of imagery—architecture, landscape forms—suggest themselves, but vanish when we come close to the surface of the picture. It’s as if we needed a different kind of visual acuity than we have normally been provided with.”

Carey Weber, the museum’s executive director noted, “This is the first museum exhibition of Forge’s work in Fairfield Country and only the second since his death in 2002. We are honored to present these sublime works.”

Lenders to the exhibition include numerous private collections, the artist’s widow Ruth Miller, Betty Cunningham Gallery, and the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art.

The exhibition will be accessible through the museum’s website as a 3-D virtual exhibition with audio tour. Due to COVID-19 precautions, Fairfield University’s campus is closed to the outside community for the foreseeable future, and in-person viewing of the exhibition will not be available.

In conjunction with the exhibition, and with the assistance of faculty liaison Suzanne Chamlin, associate professor of studio art, department of Visual & Performing Arts, the Fairfield University Art Museum has organized a full roster of public programs which will be presented virtually.

Karen Wilkin is a New York-based independent curator and art critic specializing in 20th-century modernism. Educated at Barnard College and Columbia University, she was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship to Rome. Wilkin has organized numerous international exhibitions, and is the author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Hans Hofmann. Wilkin teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program of the New York Studio School. She is the contributing editor for The New Criterion, and the Wall Street Journal.

Related programming:

Thursday, September 24, 4:00 p.m.
Opening Night Lecture - Andrew Forge: Limits of Sight
Karen Wilkin, curator of the exhibition
Independent curator and art critic
Professor, Master of Fine Arts Program, New York Studio School
Part of the Edwin L. Weisl, Jr. Lectureships in Art History, funded by the Robert Lehman Foundation

Wednesday, September 30, 6:00 -7:00 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Andrew Forge: An Artist’s Perspective
Suzanne Chamlin, associate professor of Studio Art, department of Visual & Performing Arts, Fairfield University

Thursday, October 1, 11:00 a.m.
Art in Focus: Andrew Forge
Michelle DiMarzo, PhD, Curator of Education and Academic Engagementfor>

Thursday, October 22, 5:00 p.m.
Lecture: How to Look at an Abstract Painting
Danielle Ogden, adjunct professor, Art History and Visual Culture Program, department of Visual & Performing Arts, Fairfield University

Thursday, October 29, 5:00 p.m.
Lecture: The Psychology of Art
Jennifer Drake, PhD, professor of psychology, Brooklyn College
Presented in partnership with the Departments of Psychology and Visual & Performing Arts

www.fairfield.edu/museum, or www.fuam.eventbrite.com

Photo: Andrew Forge, Winter, Kent, 1973, oil on canvas. Collection of Patrick J. Waide, Jr.‘59