Tula Telfair: Reverie
Forum Gallery
Feb. 7, 2024 - Mar. 30, 2019
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.
Tula Telfair, a resident of Old Lyme, Connecticut, is a professor of Art at Wesleyan University in Middletown. Since 1978, her work has been exhibited at museums from Pennsylvania to California and galleries from New York to Sri Lanka. Tula Telfair’s paintings may be found in dozens of museum and public collections, including those of the Arkansas Art Center, Epoch Investment Partners, the Federal Reserve Bank, General Electric Corporation, the Hudson River Museum, NBC Universal, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and Omni Hotels.
Tula Telfair: Reverie opens with a reception for the artist on Thursday, February 7, 2019 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, and will be on view through Saturday, March 30, 2019.
Forum Gallery is located at 475 Park Avenue at 57th Street, New York, NY 10022. Please visit forumgallery.com/exhibitions/tula-telfair-reverie to view the entire exhibition online. The exhibition begins on February 7, 2019 and will be on view through March 30, 2019. Forum Gallery is open Monday through Saturday, 10am to 5:30pm. A full-color catalogue is available from the gallery.
For more information, please contact Kevin Dao, 212-355-4545; [email protected]