Forum Gallery is very pleased to return to the Navy Pier on April 11-14 for the 2024 edition of EXPO Chicago, now a part of the Frieze family. Championing outstanding contemporary figurative art in the context of its twentieth-century antecedents for sixty years, for EXPO Chicago 2024 Forum Gallery will present exceptional paintings, drawings and textile works by twentieth-century masters, together with the best of today’s artists dedicated to figurative expression.
Of special note in our presentation are masterworks by Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000) and William Beckman (b.1942), recognized as two of America’s most unique and visionary figurative painters of recent times. Close friends in life, fierce competitors in art and mutual admirers for decades, Gregory Gillespie and William Beckman were first shown together in 1981 in the landmark traveling exhibition, Contemporary American Realism since 1960, curated by Frank Goodyear and first presented at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. A two-person exhibition, The Art of William Beckman and Gregory Gillespie, curated by Carl Belz, soon followed at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA in 1984. On view in our booth will be two rare masterpieces: Beckman’s Diana III, 1976, and Gillespie’s Studio Wall (Still Life with Self-Portrait), 1976. Monumental in presence, both works were in the same major Washington, DC collection for four decades and have rarely been shown publicly.
On view in our booth will be outstanding new works by two of today’s brightest figurative artists, Clio Newton (b.1989) and Alyssa Monks (b.1977), who offer unapologetically emotional works that explore the psychology of their female sitters in distinctive and defiant drawings and oil paintings on a heroic scale. Also presented will be a new self-portrait by Steven Assael (b.1957), considered one of the foremost painters of his generation. Poetic still-life harmonies transcending objects and landscapes into magnetic, meditative works of art by Robert Bauer (b.1942), G. Daniel Massad (b.1946), Alan Magee (b.1947) and Anthony Mitri (b.1951) will be on view; along with works by Chicago-based artist and educator Maria Tomasula (b.1958), who gives us immaculately crafted, thought-provoking trompe l’oeil paintings that never cease to amaze.
Artists Rance Jones (b.1965) and Michael C. Thorpe (b.1993) are compelled to depict the ordinary lives of people they observe. Jones’ astonishing watercolors sensitively portray the people and their lives in modern-day Cuba, while Thorpe’s witty narrative works come to life in quilts that explore his personal encounters and his experience as a bi-racial man in America. Painting in the tradition of Spanish realism, Chilean artist Guillermo Muñoz Vera (b.1956) is internationally known for his luminous paintings in oil that reveal his own interpretation of the human condition, and observations about the history and impact of globalism.
We look forward to sharing our presentation and seeing you in Forum Gallery’s booth #155!
