Artist’s Reception: Friday, July 1, 5:30 – 7:30pm

LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Forrest Moses: Clearings, on view at our historic downtown venue from July 1 – 31, 2011. This solo exhibition will present recent paintings and monotypes by one of the nation’s most celebrated landscape artists. Establishing a dynamic tension between abstraction and representation, Moses’s masterful depictions of serene woodlands and placid bodies of water emphasize both the tranquility of their subject matter and the eloquence of understated gestures. His is an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, expertly balanced compositions include no more than necessary in the service of evocation, and a uniquely refined and fluid elegance informs every brushstroke.

Frequently depicting the liminal spaces at the boundaries of land and water, Moses’s deeply meditative paintings and unique monotypes communicate experiences of the natural world with unassuming beauty and zen-like restraint. Profoundly informed by Japanese aesthetics, he embraces the principle of wabi-sabi: the realization that things become more beautiful as they age and transition. He seeks, in his own words, "to discover nature’s truth and give life to a painted image by understanding the rhythms and pulses behind appearances.” As such, his art depends on extraordinary painterly instincts to magnify the intensity of essentialized expressions—underscoring the importance of negative space as a sign of the purity resident in absence.

Forrest Moses was born in 1934 in Danville, Virginia. He holds a bachelor’s in fine art from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and pursued further study in design and architecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. For the past forty years, his work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in a wide array of premier national and international museums, most notably the World Collection, Yokohama, Japan; Pratt Institute, New York; Art Dumonde, Tokyo; and the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe. His monograph, Forrest Moses, produced by Kensho Editions and printed in Verona, Italy, is an elegant, full-color presentation of this enduring artist’s unique contribution to modern landscape painting.

For additional information and images, please contact Alex Ross by phone at (505) 988-3250 or via email at [email protected].

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