Tula Telfair: Reverie

New York, NY – From February 7 to March 30, 2019, Forum Gallery presents Reverie, an exhibition of landscape paintings by American artist Tula Telfair. In this exhibition, her sixth at Forum, Tula Telfair delves deeply into the depths of memory, recalling her upbringing as the child of scientists in West Africa. Although none of the subjects is literal, the powerful images she remembers inform each painting she creates. In her practice, Tula Telfair has often imagined a place she may have visited, or that may not exist; now, in the fourteen paintings that comprise Reverie, she explores the inner reaches of her dreams and memories, taking us to places she has been or believes in so fully that she is able to portray and take the viewer to the essential, emotional center of every location as she recalls not only the place, but the sense of discovery, of wonder she felt as she found it. The lush warmth of sub-tropical rivers, the majestic power of snow-capped mountains, the peaceful silence of calm waters and the distinctive roar of waterfalls are the essential, natural phenomena on display in Telfair’s paintings. The exceptional detail in her technique belies the imaginary nature of the subject as the medium scale of the works belies the expansive, majestic power of the landscape depicted. Throughout her career, Telfair has conceived all her landscape subjects from vivid imagination; Abrams books published a monograph on Tula Telfair’s work entitled Invented Landscapes with essays by Henry Adams, J. Michael Fay and Michael Roth in 2016.