DFN Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Cornelia Foss.  Her airy Long Island landscapes and portraits of family and friends are painted with grace and confidence. These restrained yet painterly images of nature and of loved ones are consistent with the modernist tradition that began with Pierre Bonnard and continued with Milton Avery and Fairfield Porter.

Foss observes, investigates, and reveals the light and air specific to her beloved East End environment with adroit brushstrokes and broad expanses of color. As she explains to John Guare in the catalogue accompanying this exhibition:

What appeals to me about Long Island is its very flatness which is so American. It couldn’t be anywhere else. The way the fields run right to the ocean. The endlessness of the ocean just beyond Wainscott pond. Other landscapes prepare you for the ocean. Dover, for instance, where the landscape ends at the punctuation mark of the cliffs, a clear demarcation line between land and sea.  In German painting, landscapes are one chapter, seascapes another chapter.  On the east end of Long Island, it’s simply the fields and then the vast nothing of the sea all on the same plane.  You move seamlessly from one world to the other.

Foss lets the simple shapes and lines of the coastal landscape guide her compositions, as in her three serene paintings of Wainscott Pond, depicted in spring, summer, and fall.  The seasons are completed by her saturated, brooding winter painting Big Blue Sea.  Garden Flowers I, returns us to spring with a nearly abstract tangle of soft floral hues dancing against a deep blue sky.  Similar to the emotional range represented by the four seasons, is the scope of human frailty and youthful vigor depicted in Foss’s keenly observed portraits – as evidenced by her touching portrait of her late husband Lukas and her portrayal of her young granddaughter Olivia in Olivia in the Garden.

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

A catalogue with an introduction by John Guare is available through the gallery (click here to read).  The entire exhibit can also be viewed on our website.