Cornelia Foss
New Paintings
May 17 – June 18, 2005

DFN Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Cornelia Foss.  These landscapes depicting East End Long Island vistas, the yard of her Bridgehampton home, and Central Park chronicle Ms. Foss’s surroundings over the past year.  Also included in this exhibit are portraits of her husband, the composer Lukas Foss, and her young grandchildren. 

Foss recreates her environment with painterly finesse, swift brushstrokes, broad expanses of color, and selective detail.  Shifts in season, with their subtle changes in light and color, are the prominent feature of this exhibit.  The soft pastels of “June” morph into the stark summer brightness of “Sag Surf,” and then into the jewel tones of “September Blue.” The dappled light upon the newly furled leaves of “Spring Ride” is complemented by the richer emerald greens and floral tapestry in “Butterfly Bush.”  Foss’s winter paintings accentuate the interplay between low sunlight and the shadows upon the snow-covered grass and evergreens.

In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibit, art critic Karen Wilkin writes:

The thoroughness with which Foss knows her motifs liberates her both to reduce them to essentials and to consider the most evanescent of nuances… In Foss’s straightforward, keenly observed canvases, ephemeral, unreturning moments are distilled, distanced by translation into the language of paint and painting, and magically preserved. 

Cornelia Foss studied sculpture and painting in Indiana and Rome, Italy.  She has been exhibiting internationally for over fifty years.  Her work is in many distinguished public and private collections, including the Arkansas Arts Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Oklahoma, the National Museum for Women and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.  Foss teaches at the Art Students League and the National Academy, and lives and works in Manhattan and Bridgehampton, New York. 

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