Alyssa Monks: Resolution

New York, NY – From March 24 to May 7, 2016, Forum Gallery presents Resolution, its first one-person exhibition of paintings by Brooklyn-based artist, Alyssa Monks. The artist, who earned an MFA degree with honors from the New York Academy of Art in 2001, first showed her bold, figurative work publicly in 2002. Her paintings have since been presented at galleries and museums from Northern California to the south of France and in New York, Michigan, Maryland and Florida.

In the ten years since her first solo exhibition in New York, Alyssa Monks has demonstrated the unique ability to blend figures seamlessly with their environment in a natural and sensuous continuum. Monks first used the properties of water, steam and glass to submerge and enshroud the individuals in her paintings. Now, her characters appear as essential elements of the natural landscape. Monks’ engaging, figurative subjects have moved from the intimacy of the interior to the bold, open wilderness as she continues to incorporate the physical properties of nature into her models. Neither portraits nor narratives, Monks’ paintings combine elements of portraiture and landscape into single-figure examinations of loss, love, desire and hope as they engage the viewer with lush, painterly surfaces, colors and brushstrokes.

In the thirteen large-scale paintings and related, smaller studies on view, the likenesses of Alyssa Monks’ subjects are revealed among trees and vines as elements of light, color and moisture – neither of the physical world nor the imaginary, they appear as apparitions. There is a strong sense of memory in every work, both the memory of place and time and the memory of past, human relationships.