Forum Gallery is pleased to return for the 35th edition of The Art Show organized by the Art Dealers Association of America, benefiting Henry Street Settlement. The Art Show will once again be presented at The Park Avenue Armory in New York City from November 2-5, 2023.

For The Art Show, Forum Gallery presents rarely seen works by William Beckman (b. 1942), and Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000) two of America’s most unique and visionary figurative painters of modern times. Our presentation at The Art Show is a preview of the gallery’s upcoming exhibition dedicated to the two artists, opening on November 16, 2023 and continuing through January 6, 2024.

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 exhibition, Contemporary American Realism since 1960, curated by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., presented by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Oakland Museum, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal, and Kunsthalle Nuremberg, Germany. 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.

The artists shared the power to illuminate life through revelatory focus on its organized detail above and beneath the surface of the individual subject. For The Art Show, Beckman’s Diana III, 1976, and Gillespie’s Studio Wall, 1976, both in the same major Washington, DC collection for four decades, are exhibited publicly for the first time together.