Forum Gallery

As we welcome 2025, Forum Gallery is pleased to present 25 New Works for the New Year, an exhibition featuring exceptional paintings and drawings by seventeen of Forum Gallery’s contemporary artists. The exhibition opens on Thursday, February 6, and continues through Saturday, March 29, 2025.

Forum Gallery presents Twentieth Century Stories, a curated exhibition of works of art that capture unique narratives from a century of dynamic change. On view are works by seventeen insightful artists whose life experiences were as diverse as they were profound. The paintings, works on paper, photography and sculpture on view are compelling, humanist expressions of subjects that include civil rights, the human toll of war, and the century’s industrial progress, public works, and entertainment that challenged the world and changed modern life.

Forum Gallery is pleased to present What’s New?, our first exhibition of the Fall season spotlighting works new to the gallery. Dating from 1917 to the present, the exhibition will feature twenty-two oil paintings, watercolors, pastel and pencil works on paper by fourteen artists.

Forum Gallery presents Out of Town, an exhibition about the human desire to escape our busy urban lives for the reverie of landscape vistas and seasonal adventures. By the hand of a diverse selection of visionary contemporary and twentieth-century artists, the twenty-nine paintings, works on paper, and textiles comprising the exhibition present visual interpretations of landscapes and nature’s seasonal offerings inspired by natural subjects from coast-to-coast and faraway shores, as well as expressions of the artist’s own personal introspection.

Forum Gallery is pleased to host this year’s presentation of the "New York Academy of Art Summer Exhibition." A much anticipated annual summer tradition, the exhibition will be on view from June 20th to July 19th, 2024 and will feature sixty works, including paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures by New York Academy of Art alumni, students, and faculty. We would like to extend our congratulations to the artists selected by the 2024 Summer Exhibition jurors Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle from Pace Gallery, Artist Eric Fischl, Robert Fishko from Forum Gallery, and Alissa Friedman from Stephen Friedman Gallery: Jean Pierre Arboleda (MFA 2006) Joan Benefiel (MFA 2007) Ard Berge (MFA 1997) Miriam Carothers (MFA 2024) Jenny Chi (MFA 1998) Ally Cotton (MFA 2025) Denis Dalesio (MFA 2020) Stephanie Deshpande (MFA 1999) Peter Drake (Provost) Precious Eboigbodin (MFA 2025) Alaina Plowdrey Forehand (MFA 2011) Jodi Gerbi (MFA 2016) Connor Gewirtz (MFA 2024) Danielle Golden (MFA 2024) Ada Goldfeld (Faculty) Ling Gui (MFA 2023) Gabriela Handal (MFA 2015) Austin Harris (MFA 2020) Jacob Hayes (MFA 2014) Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012) Emily Hildebrand (MFA 2000) Jackson Hill (MFA 2023) Georgia Hinaris (MFA 2019) Kerrie King (CFA 2018) Will Kurtz (MFA 2009, Fellow 2010) Irina Lakshin (MFA 2021) Lisa Lebofsky (MFA 2006) Amber Lia-Kloppel (MFA 2007) Anastasia Lopoukhine (MFA 2021) Jonathan MacGregor (MFA 2024) J. Adam McGalliard (MFA 2003) Tina Dion Mehrpouy (MFA 2025) Mustafa Mohsin (MFA 2024) Alyssa Monks (MFA 2001) Ursula Mur (CFA 2024) Andrea Olivia (MFA 2025) oneslutriot (MFA 2025) Madeline Owen (MFA 2024) Laura Peturson (MFA 2005) PG Picasso (MFA 2024) Bo Prather (MFA 2023) Laura Romaine (MFA 2022, Chubb Fellow 2024) Nicola Russell (MFA 2024) Bahar Sabzevari (MFA 2018) Guillermo Serrano Amat (MFA 2024) Chié Shimizu (MFA 2001) Kathy Stecko (MFA 2000) Vithya Truong (MFA 2007) John Volk (MFA 1998) Kaley Weil (MFA 2024) Sophia Weisensel (MFA 2021) Julianna Wells (MFA 2019) Monica Whalley (MFA 2003) Stephen Winiecki (MFA 2009) Jiannan Wu (MFA 2016, Faculty) Nan Xu (MFA 2017) Zane York (MFA 2003, Faculty)

From May 1 through June 14, 2024, Forum Gallery, New York, will present a special exhibition celebrating twenty-five years of Brian Rutenberg’s (b. 1965) art with Forum Gallery. Brian Rutenberg: Celebrating 25 Years will showcase Brian Rutenberg’s vibrant, colorful abstract paintings inspired by the landscape of his birthplace, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in twenty-one works dating from 1998 to the present. Each painting is a highlight of his artistic evolution, while together the works in the exhibition illuminate the magnetic, enduring appeal of his art that has made Brian Rutenberg one of this country’s most popular painters. Brian Rutenberg joined Forum Gallery shortly after his return from a year in Ireland on a Fulbright Scholarship. The formative experience cemented for the artist that while the landscape was a starting point for his paintings, they were not “about landscape.” Images refer to trees, ponds, and atmospheric hazes but these anchor points give way to color and love, turning Rutenberg’s paintings into deeply emotive portals to places of palpable energy and harmonious contrasts. Rutenberg recalls the words of Art Historian, Kenneth Clark “Ideas become fact through love,” “a great glaze that connects cultures” according to Rutenberg, and the great connector of his art throughout the past twenty-five years. Robert Fishko, Director of Forum Gallery recalls: “I was startled and amazed when I saw Brian Rutenberg’s painting for the first time, 26 years ago. The abstract landscape image… had the fresh boldness of fractal line, the intensity of near-synchronist color and the spontaneous surface of improvisation… To see his work mature and develop has been among the greatest gifts I’ve experienced in the art world.” Brian Rutenberg attended the College of Charleston (SC) and the School of Visual Arts (NY). A Fulbright scholar (1997), he lives in New York and both of his children are enrolled in the College of Charleston. Brian Rutenberg: Celebrating 25 Years opens on May 1 with an opening reception with the artist from 5:30 to 7:30pm. On May 7 from 5:30 to 7pm Forum Gallery will host Brian Rutenberg and Jonathan Miller Spies, “In Conversation.”

Opening March 14th and continuing through April 27th, Forum Gallery will present "Spring Forward," a group exhibition of thirty paintings, drawings, and sculpture encompassing the spirit of springtime, nature’s annual rebirth relished for its reinvigorating light, color, and flora and the energy it imparts, refreshing our vision for the future, propelling us into action. Setting the mood with the melody of springtime will be the charming, "Colored Bird," 1960, sculpted by Max Weber in painted bronze, alongside acrobats and mothers with their children that spring into play in three sculptures by Chaim Gross created between 1944 and 1968. Eponymous with Spring is the season’s colorful displays, which we will celebrate in glorious floral works and still lifes by Claudio Bravo, Charles Demuth, Susan Hauptman, G. Daniel Massad, and Anthony Mitri. Landscapes infused with vitality and Spring light by Benny Andrews, Robert Bauer, William Beckman, Davis Cone, Rackstraw Downes, and Tula Telfair will be on view alongside paintings by Guillermo Muñoz Vera featuring the gardens of the Alhambra and a New York scene by Raphael Soyer evoking civilizations awakening to the fresh days ahead. Charging beyond the picture plane into an unchartered future is Alyssa Monks’ female protagonist enmeshed in botanicals in "Maybe if I Try Harder," 2023; while Alan Magee’s larger-than-life metaphorical "Compass," 2019, reorients us in an evocative arrangement of driftwood. Brian Rutenberg’s electric landscape abstraction, "Pillow & Petal 6," 2023, cries out “Eureka!” in bolts of energy shot across the canvas in springtime hues. Love is in the air in Clio Newton’s new lyrical charcoal of an embracing couple; while Michael C. Thorpe’s quietly poetic moment alone fishing on a picturesque lake, "Da Boat," 2022, rendered in stitches and quilting, reminds us of times reconnecting with nature. Maria Tomasula contemplates our complex human make-up and relationship to nature in "River," 2017-18; while in oils by Alan Feltus and Paul Fenniak, dreamlike visions and questioning insights ignite springtime ideals of rebirth and personal growth.

Forum Gallery presents a two-person exhibition of new and bold figurative works by Alyssa Monks (b. 1977) and Clio Newton (b. 1989). The two women are among today’s most influential, internationally-recognized artists. While each has a unique approach to her art, both artists employ formidable technique to portray a thoroughly contemporary sensibility.