Brian Gross Fine Art is pleased to announce Man of Our Times: Drawings by Roy De Forest, opening Saturday, May 6, with a reception from 3–5pm. Featuring mixed media works on paper from the last two decades of De Forest’s career, the exhibition contains a survey of major works displayed in the elaborately carved and painted frames that became a signature of this renowned Bay Area artist. Recognized as one of the most original painters of his generation, De Forest’s works resonate with bright colors and complex compositional structures depicting semi-abstracted, folk-like landscapes of dogs, horses, birds, and people. Man of Our Times: Drawings by Roy De Forest will be on view through July 1, 2017.

The exhibition at Brian Gross Fine Art is being mounted in conjunction with the first complete retrospective of Roy De Forest’s work, organized by the Oakland Museum of California. Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest will be on view from April 29 – August 20, 2017, and contains over 50 paintings, sculptures, and other works by this unique American artist. In celebration of the retrospective, UC Press and the Oakland Museum have published a monograph of the same name, with an essay by the exhibition curator, Susan Landauer, Ph.D. The catalogue is available through Brian Gross Fine Art, UC Press, and the Oakland Museum.

Another related Roy De Forest event in San Francisco is the Civic Art Collection Focus: Roy De Forest exhibition at the San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery. On view from May 3 – August 9, 2017, the exhibition will include De Forest’s monumental painting Homage to Zane Grey (1978), on loan from SFO, and the rare proposal for the Moscone Convention Center Competition, Hypothetical Cartoon/Tapestry/Moscone Center/SF (1981), along with three other works from the City’s public collection.

Born in North Platte, Nebraska, in 1930, Roy De Forest received his MA from San Francisco State University and was a member of the illustrious art faculty at UC Davis from 1965 to 1992. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe, and was the subject of a mid-career survey, which originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1974 and traveled to the Fort Worth Art Museum, the Glenbow-Alberta Art Gallery, Calgary, Alberta, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City. Roy De Forest died in 2007.

Roy De Forest is represented in numerous public collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Yale University Art Gallery; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Art Institute of Chicago; Denver Art Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Berkeley Art Museum, UC Berkeley; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University; The Anderson Collection at Stanford University; Honolulu Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art; di Rosa, Napa, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Seattle Art Museum; Palm Springs Art Museum; Jan Shem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among others.