Brian Rutenberg: Lowcountry

New York, NY - Forum Gallery in New York will present an exhibition entitled Lowcountry: New Paintings, by artist Brian Rutenberg, on view from March 23 through May 6, 2017.

The exhibition will showcase eleven new paintings by American nature-based abstract artist Brian Rutenberg (b. 1965). This new group of paintings is a reflection of the artist’s love for the South Carolina lowcountry where he grew up. His visceral infatuation with the place has been his principal aesthetic concern for the last two decades. According to the artist, these new paintings are not just about his passion for the landscape, but also about the detailed expression of his journey from his birthplace to New York, where he now works and lives. Working in bold strokes of rich, thick paint, Rutenberg builds and sculpts his surfaces to achieve rhythmic, faceted passages contrasting with pools of light and dark to evoke the endless variants of the landscape that inspires him:

My connection to the landscape of coastal South Carolina has nothing to do with nostalgia; it’s much broader than memory. It’s my clear-seeing place. Everything I needed to become a painter I got long ago, those things must be sustained and permeate everything I do…

Brian Rutenberg (born 1965, Charleston, SC) lives and works in New York City. He is a Fulbright scholar (1997) and a graduate of The College of Charleston and the School of Visual Arts (NY). His paintings are in permanent museum collections, including the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL; Ogden Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; and the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA. Brian Rutenberg has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Cress Gallery of Art at The University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, TN; the Cotuit Center for the Arts, Cotuit, MA; and currently, a retrospective of paintings at the Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI through June 3, 2017. He has exhibited at galleries across the country, and his work is collected throughout the US and Europe.