The Hammer Museum presents Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, focusing on the remarkable accomplishments of this under-recognized American painter. A singular figure in American art who experienced significant recognition and painful isolation during his life—and whose fame has waxed and waned since his death—Forrest Bess (1911-1977) has recently become the subject of keen new interest. The first museum retrospective devoted to Bess in more than twenty years, Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible presents 52 of the artist’s visionary paintings, dating from 1946 to 1970. This exhibition also includes a selection of correspondence, photographs, and articles by and about Bess chosen by artist Robert Gober for the 2012 Whitney Biennial as well as additional extended labels written by Gober.

Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible is organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, and curated by assistant curator Clare Elliott. The Hammer’s presentation, on view September 29, 2013 – January 5, 2014, is organized by Cynthia Burlingham, deputy director, curatorial affairs and director, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. Following the presentation at the Hammer Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York.

“Forrest Bess is an artist whose work is compelling, mysterious, and largely unknown to contemporary audiences,” says Hammer Director Ann Philbin. “We are so pleased to show Bess for the first time in Los Angeles and thrilled to be collaborating with the Menil and with Bob Gober. I know our visitors are going to be entranced by Bess’s work and his fascinating story.”

Though championed by the distinguished gallerist Betty Parsons, Bess never attained the reputation enjoyed by contemporaneous abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still all of whom she also represented during the same period. Bess’s distinctive style, methods, and thinking set him apart from his peers, and subsequently the importance of his contributions have been largely overlooked. While the powerful visions Bess expressed on canvas create a sense of expansiveness in their intensity, the physical size of the paintings is diminutive when compared to the large-scale works created by abstract expressionists active during the same period. Stunning, mysterious, and alluring, as objects his paintings were also ciphers, part of a coded message he was continually attempting to reveal.

Works in the exhibition come from the Menil’s own holdings, private lenders in the United States and Europe, and major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Self-described “visionary” artist Forrest Bess (1911-1977) is a unique figure in the history of American art. For most of his artistic career, Bess lived an isolated existence in a fishing camp outside of Bay City, Texas. He eked a meager living fishing and selling bait by day. By night and during the off-season he read, wrote, and painted prolifically, creating an extraordinary body of mostly small-scale canvases rich with enigmatic symbolism. Despite his remoteness, Bess made himself known in the 1950s in New York (then the undisputed center of the art world). The prominent artist and dealer Betty Parsons represented Bess, dedicating six solo exhibitions to his work between 1949 and 1967.

Bess taught himself to paint by copying the still-lives and landscapes of artists he admired, such as Vincent Van Gogh and Albert Pinkham Ryder. From early childhood and throughout his life, Bess experienced intense hallucinations, which both frightened and intrigued him; in 1946, he began to incorporate images from his visions into his paintings. After discovering Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, Bess began to understand painting not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to an end. By meticulously recording and studying the dream-symbols captured in his artwork, Bess hoped to uncover their universal meaning.

To aid in his search for meaning Bess looked for clues in literature from a variety of fields- medical, psychological, anthropological, and philosophical. He eventually formulated a theory, which he referred to as his “thesis,” that the unification of male and female within one’s body could produce immortality. He so sincerely believed in his idea that he not only sent written copies of the thesis (now lost) to prominent researchers, but used his own body as a testing ground, performing several operations on his own genitals in an effort to produce a hermaphroditic state. Robert Gober’s installation, The Man That Got Away, which brings together a selection of Bess’s artwork and writings and photographs of the artist, is the first attempt to present the “thesis” and acknowledge its realization in Bess’s own body.