LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce the first major posthumous survey exhibition of paintings by renowned abstracted landscape painter Forrest Moses who passed away in 2021.

The show assembles a rare range of nearly forty paintings, including some of the artist’s largest and most exemplary works, created over five decades and revealing the subtle development of a modern master’s evolving and refined painting sensibility and philosophical maturity across a long and distinguished career.

Considered one of the finest painters of the abstracted landscape genre in American contemporary art, Moses (1934-2021) comes out of a rich tradition that sought to capture both the majesty and intimacy of America’s diverse natural environments. His work conveys the kind of luminosity found in the astonishing late-career landscapes of John Singer Sargent, and, like Sargent, Moses evokes the flow of water or rustling of leaves with confident brushstrokes. Having studied in New York during the 1950s, Moses credits the Abstract Expressionist movement fomenting around him at the time to renewing his creative interest in contemporary art. Some have suggested that Moses’ synthesis of classical subject matter and a contemporary approach could link him artistically with painters such as Joan Mitchell (an artist he much admired) whose works were inspired by and gestured toward the features of landscape though presented on canvas in a wholly abstracted mode.

Moses’ study and incorporation of philosophy elevated his landscapes beyond the elements of form and medium, and his Eastern influences further distinguished them from the particularities of Transcendentalism that inevitably thread throughout the American landscape tradition. For Moses, painting was an act of reverence for the beauty inherent in the natural world.

The creative process was for Moses deeply spiritual. To “capture the aliveness” of nature was to convey its sense of the sacred, which he so successfully communicated throughout his long career in his stirringly evocative paintings. As his work evolved, it became renowned for its power to enchant and the capacity of its poetic qualities to impart the atmosphere of Nature. In the contemplation of the work viewers found it possible to suspend their day- to-day preoccupations and find a certain sublime engagement with the grace of being in Nature.

At the heart of Moses’ remarkable work is a deep affirmation of the beauty of the weathered, the broken, the bare, the ephemeral and the mysterious, wonderful beauty of the sublime. It is here that the genius and power of Moses’ work resides, and it is from here that his work will forever remain enduringly engaging.

Moses’ work is included in numerous major private collections and in those of diverse public institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art. His monograph, Forrest Moses, published by Kensho Editions and printed in Verona, Italy, is an elegant, full-color presentation of this artist’s unique oil on canvas and monotype works. Moses was born in Danville, Virginia, and studied at Washington and Lee University, along with the Pratt Institute in New York.