Lorser Feitelson: Magical Forms
January 25 – March 8, 2025
Since 1944 my painting has been concerned with the “magical”: the metamorphosis of the unreal into reality and, vice versa, reality into the unreal – and reality beyond itself into extra existences.
– Lorser Feitelson, c. 1961
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Lorser Feitelson: Magical Forms. This exhibition features works from Lorser Feitelson’s series of the same name, which acted as the direct precursors to the artist’s celebrated Magical Space Forms paintings of the 1950s. They represent an important transitional moment in Feitelson’s career, bridging the intellectually and emotionally charged figural content of his earlier paintings and the coolly rational Hard Edge abstract work that he focused on in his later career.
In the mid-1940s, Feitelson (1898-1978) began to embark on a remarkable departure from his highly symbolic and carefully composed Post-Surrealist work and from the deeply personal allegorical paintings that immediately followed. In stark contrast to his previous work, which focused on representing familiar objects and the human figure, Feitelson now sought to invent novel abstract forms that contained no direct reference to any known image. While his later Magical Space Forms series removed all allusions to volume and three-dimensional space, Feitelson rendered his Magical Forms as fully defined, non-specific physical entities inhabiting tangible yet unearthly environments. Described within a structurally legible visual framework, the exaggerated strangeness of these uncanny forms provides a conduit for emotional expression of the inexplicable.
These disquieting forms, while entirely invented, arouse vague, disjointed flickers of remembered images, contorted to the point of unrecognizability. Sinister shapes resembling knife-sharp jaws, flattened tissue-thin, feel no less hostile as they advance from a shadowy interior space. Stretched pelvic forms appear engaged in clandestine conversation or straddle multiple competing horizon lines, balanced implausibly on spindly appendages terminating in sharp points. The scale and volume of the forms are as ambiguous as their intentions, vacillating between naked malice and self-contained disregard. These paintings uniquely convey the malaise and anxiety of the aftermath of World War II and the dawn of the Atomic Age, which occupied the artist’s mind amidst the works’ creation. This series, in Feitelson’s words, “metaphorically expresses the deep disturbance of our time: ominously magnificent and terrifying events, hurtling menacingly from the unforeseeable.”
Works by Lorser Feitelson are included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among numerous other public and private collections.
Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Lorser Feitelson.
