NEW YORK, NY.- From February 6 to March 15, 2014, Forum Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000). In his New York Times obituary, Roberta Smith called Gillespie “an artist whose probing, urgent, often bizarre paintings occupied a singular place in the history of late-20th-century representation.”

The exhibition, Supernatural Observation, includes the surreal landscape and interior, Back Entrance, Williamsburg, Massachusetts, 1972, the first major painting completed after the artist’s return from Italy, where Fulbright and Chester Dale grants had enabled him to work at the American Academy in Rome for eight years. This painting was a memorable highpoint of Gregory Gillespie’s retrospective exhibition at the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC in 1977 (catalogue).

Also featured are four works, including a self-portrait and an early portrait of the artist’s wife, Head of Peg, all of which were in the collection of the late Allan Stone.

Gregory Gillespie defied characterization in his four-decade quest to depict what he called a “reality beyond our senses”. Each of the symbolic and psychologically intense paintings in the exhibition has been chosen to illustrate this singular vision.

Forum Gallery was the first and only New York Gallery for Gregory Gillespie in his lifetime. His paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and many others.

Supernatural Observation is the twentieth one-person exhibition organized by Forum Gallery of Gregory Gillespie’s work.