About the Exhibition

Fairfield University Art Museum is pleased to present Andrew Forge: The Limits of Sight. British artist Andrew Forge (1923-2002) was both an acclaimed painter and an influential art critic, the author of books on Edgar Degas, Nahum Gabo, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. A selection of Forge’s criticism, Observation: Notation, was published in 2018. After immigrating to the US in 1973, Forge taught at Cooper Union and served as the associate dean of the New York Studio School, where he was a visiting professor until 2002. He was the dean and professor of the Yale University School of Art from 1975-1994. Forge’s highly personal abstractions distill his perceptions of place, season, and time of day into subtle orchestrations of pure color.

The exhibition was thoughtfully curated by Karen Wilkin, a New York-based independent curator and art critic, specializing in 20th-century modernism. Wilkin writes the following about Forge’s work 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.”

This exhibition was made possible by the generosity of the lenders which include numerous private collectors, the artist’s widow Ruth Miller, Betty Cuningham Gallery, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art.

Virtual Tour

Browse Selected Artworks

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Andrew Forge 'The Limits of Sight' Gallery Overview

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Opening Lecture: Andrew Forge: The Limits of Sight

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Gallery Talk: Andrew Forge, An Artist's Perspective

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Opening Lecture: Andrew Forge: The Limits of Sight

Gallery Talk: Andrew Forge: An Artist’s Perspective

Lecture: How to Look at an Abstract Painting

Lecture: The Psychology of Art

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