Forum Gallery

About the Gallery
Forum Gallery was founded in New York City in 1961 by Bella Fishko as a gallery of American figurative art. Among the first artists represented were Raphael Soyer, Chaim Gross, Charles White, and Philip Evergood. The gallery is a founding member of the Art Dealers Association of America. From inception, Forum Gallery’s contemporary program has been augmented by mounting curated, thematic exhibitions of historic importance, in keeping with the gallery’s focus on humanism.

About the Presentation
Forum Gallery will present work by Raphael Soyer in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. Forum Gallery has represented the American social realist painter Raphael Soyer (1899-1987) and his estate since its founding. Soyer was included in Forum Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in the fall of 1961, and the gallery proudly facilitated a traveling retrospective honoring Soyer, organized by the Whitney Museum of Fine Art and first presented at The Breuer Building in 1967 before traveling to six additional museums across the country.

Soyer immigrated to the United States in 1912 as an impressionable twelve-year-old boy. Settling on New York’s lower east side, he went on to become a central figure of the Fourteenth Street School and a beloved American artist whose contribution is a vital and irreplaceable component of American figurative art in the 20th Century. As a young artist in the 1930s, Soyer’s focus turned to the working class and dispossessed during the Depression and World War II eras, culminating in his mature and heartfelt observations of friends, family and models. Writing for the New York Times in 1972, John Canaday described Soyer as the “dean of American realist painters. ” Soyer once observed, “My art is representational by choice. In my opinion, if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times… It must communicate. ”