New York, NY – From February 27 through April 25, 2020, Forum Gallery, New York, will present The Pond, an exhibition of new abstract landscape paintings by Brian Rutenberg. For this exhibition, his seventh at Forum Gallery, Brian Rutenberg (b. 1965) has created twelve new paintings inspired by the heat, humidity and landscape of his native South Carolina lowcountry.

About this latest body of work, Brian Rutenberg writes:

Humidity made me a painter. All of these new paintings are meditations on an imaginary pond as seen through veils of South Carolina Lowcountry heat. The oval has been a primary shape in my work for forty-five years; my first paintings were watercolors of a pond near my childhood home in Myrtle Beach, where I spent a lot of time because I had buck teeth and was horrible at sports. Little did I know, the directness and simplicity of those studies would provide me with a lifetime of imagery. Everything I’m trying to do in my paintings is embodied in the solitary act of viewing a pond. Foreground is close, my sneakers on the muddy bank. Middle ground is the protective gelatin of water. Background is far away. Content is a function of how near or far away things appear from your face. As I walk around to the other side, that which was hidden becomes visible. Likewise, a painting doesn’t reveal itself all at once, but in flecks of partial recognition. I love parades and processionals for this reason. A processional abandons its starting point. Travel eliminates its origins. We are where we go. I paint because I can never see enough places. So, I return to one. My movement becomes a pond, the pond becomes a thought, and the thought returns me to the wealth of humidity. 

In conjunction with this exhibition, Forum Gallery will release Brian Rutenberg’s new monograph, A Little Long Time. The second monograph of his paintings, this new book documents works completed since the publication of Brian Rutenberg (Radius Books) in 2008. A Little Long Time is a large-scale, hardcover book, with 152 pages, 129 color plates and a lively text by Rutenberg that draws on his life experience and what took him on his career path as a painter. The book will be available for purchase from Forum Gallery during the exhibition.

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). Rutenberg’s paintings are collected throughout the United States and Europe and are in the permanent collections of museums 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. He has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at institutions across the country including the Cress Gallery of Art at The University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, TN (2004); the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC (2009); the Cotuit Center for the Arts, Cotuit, MA (2014); and a retrospective at the Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI in 2017.

Brian Rutenberg: The Pond opens with a reception for the artist on Thursday, February 27, 2020 from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm, and will be on view through Saturday, April 25, 2020.

Forum Gallery is located at 475 Park Avenue at 57th Street, New York, NY 10022. Please visit https://www.forumgallery.com/exhibitions/ brian-rutenberg-the-pond  to view the entire exhibition online. The exhibition begins on February 27, 2020 and will be on view through April 25, 2020. Forum Gallery is open Monday through Saturday, 10am to 5:30pm.

For more information, please contact Dan Pavsic, 212-355-4545; dan@forumgallery.com