(New York – September 5, 2020) Forum Gallery announces the next offering in our Online Exhibition and Viewing Room series, Alan Magee: Witness.
Feeling acutely the anxiety of our current times, Alan Magee revisits subjects he has long explored in a poignant metaphoric insight for today’s world. Beginning in 2019, Alan Magee has created nine powerful paintings of helmets, armor and weaponry that art scholar and author Eleanor Heartney describes as “works of mourning... (at) a moment in our life and in our time where there is great sadness.”
Shown with his extraordinary new paintings are Alan Magee’s haunting monotypes that the Artist has created over decades. More than a testimony to Magee’s highly refined and diverse artistic abilities, the monotypes confront the viewer with faces that Heartney likens to the Tibetan Buddhist notion of the Bardo, “a state of existence which is halfway between death and rebirth and you have these souls...striving and struggling, and not really quite sure who they are. They remember a bit of their past, (and) they don't know where they are going to in the future.”
About the monotypes, Magee states:
“When I am working on the monotypes, I am finding that it's just instinctive to come out with something where the pathos is there, where the injury is there. The suffering can be made clear but at the same time it isn’t a moment of shrieking anguish. What I want is something that has the lasting qualities of an altar piece that you can go back to at repeated times and find an open door to the things that are dark and distressing, but that don't take away the possibility of hope.”
Alan Magee: Witness is now presented as an exclusive online exhibition on the Forum Gallery website, Artsy and Artnet. Our Online Viewing Room, available on our website, features a new video about this unforgettable and timely exhibition of works and contains insights from the Artist and Eleanor Heartney. The soundtrack is a song written by Alan Magee one month after the 2016 election titled “Singing in the Dark Times”, inspired by the poem “Motto” by Bertolt Brecht.
Alan Magee (b.1942)
After a decade as an editorial and book illustrator, Alan Magee concentrated on his drawings and paintings and had his first solo exhibition at Staempfli Gallery, New York, in 1980.
Alan Magee has received awards for his painting from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. Television documentaries about his work include the Maine PBS production, Alan Magee: Visions of Darkness and Light, and Maine Masters: Alan Magee. The artist’s most recent documentary, Alan Magee: art is not a solace, premiered at the Camden International Film as an Official Selection in September 2019.
In 2003-04, the artist was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition, organized by the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, which traveled to the James A. Michener Art Museum, Bucks County, PA, The Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX and The Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. His work has also been included in exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York, the New Britain Museum of American Art in CT, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA amongst many others.
Works by Alan Magee are in many public collections, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Arkansas Art Center, the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, the Huntington Museum of Art, WV, and the Columbus Museum of Art, OH. His work is included in many corporate collections such as Mobil Oil, Lucasfilm Inc., Cargill Corporation, the Bank of Japan, and others. Forum Gallery has represented Alan Magee since 2001.
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To visit Alan Magee: Witness, please visit the Forum Gallery online viewing room exhibition at https://viewingroom.forumgallery.com/viewing-room/alan-magee-witness#tab:slideshow. The online exhibition begins on September 5, 2020 and will be on view through October 31, 2020.
Forum Gallery is located at 475 Park Avenue at 57th Street, New York, NY 10022. After the Labor Day weekend, Forum Gallery is open to the public from Monday through Friday, 10am to 5:30pm, and Saturdays by appointment. Please call 212-355-4545 to make an appointment.
For press inquiries, please contact Dan Pavsic, 212-355-4545; dan@forumgallery.com
For sales inquiries, please contact Nicola Lorenz, Executive Director or Marjorie Van Cura,
Associate Director, 212-355-4545; gallery@forumgallery.com.