LOS ANGELES, CA.- Forum Gallery presents the exhibition An Eye for Detail from July 27th – September 15th with an opening reception Friday evening, July 27th from 7 – 9:00 p.m. The exhibition includes forty paintings, drawings and sculpture encompassing the work of twenty-two contemporary representational artists united by their gift for consummate precision.
Alan Magee is one of today’s most exceptionally talented and highly acclaimed painters. His intense scrutiny of visual objects and uncanny ability to capture forms in nature are fully demonstrated in Confessions, a small panel painting that speaks volumes. Depicting an artist’s palette-knife lying on a gray-white board, the painting shows the tool’s handle and blade subtly colored by residually dried daubs of paint from previous applications. The monochromatic hue of the background surface serves to intensify and prolong the viewer’s contemplative experience of the object-subject, in this case a tool instrumental in the very artistic process.
Chicago based artist Maria Tomasula is represented by her intensely colorful painting The Music of Chance, in which a bright yellow flower of unknown variety has blossomed, seemingly magically, as it contacts with neither earth nor water. Among an assortment of exquisite details such as gobs of guttation appearing on the petals, or the translucent, vein-like infrastructure of the flower itself, one finds additional floral elements inexplicably, and with great precision, affixed to the flower by way of sewing pins and thread. The viewer’s ken, therefore, includes both a serenity exuded by the glowing beauty of the specimen and an eeriness resulting from the implied physical discomfort. This sort of ingenious metaphor for oppositional qualities is intrinsic to Tomasula’s work.
Susan Hauptman’s thought-provoking charcoal Self-portrait (with Branch) propels the viewer into a personal and evanescent world, in which this artist constantly reinvents herself while raptly examining her own womanhood. Here Hauptman is seen wearing a white dress on which appears a sewn image of a bird perched on a fruit-bearing branch. Another branch of the same tree appears in animate form in the background of the composition, raising issues of phenomenological self-awareness inherent in the human condition.
Works by Photorealist painters Robert Cottingham, Davis Cone and William Fisk are included in the exhibition, as is a minute, detailed painting of a human eye by Delaware artist Lisa Bartolozzi from which this exhibition takes its title. A small theater study by Craig McPherson hangs beside a large painting of a fish market by Megan Rye; meticulously rendered portraits by Steven Assael, Robert Bauer, Kent Bellows, Ellen Eagle, Jeffrey Gold, Michael Leonard, Richard Maury and Bill Vuksanovich complement the equally skillful still-lifes of Raymond Han, G. Daniel Massad, Jane Lund, Wade Schuman and Andrea J. Smith.
