Curated by Clare Elliott

The work of Forrest Bess has recently reemerged in art-historical culture, contextualized with a narrative not dissimilar to that of Bess’s artistic idol, van Gogh: A painter (rich in homo sacer innuendo) rends open the aesthetic dialectic of corporeality and sensibility to clear room for an exceptional bioaesthetic art, resulting not only in radical acts of body modification and diagnoses of madness but also (for us) a ground plan for the reorganization of artistic possibility, both on canvas and off. Consolidating forty-eight of Bess’s paintings and an expanded version of Robert Gober’s celebrated curatorial project “The Man That Got Away,” from last year’s Whitney Biennial, this exhibition and catalogue are the next steps in spawning light from Bess’s refreshingly sacral body of work.

— Sam Pulitzer