Aristotle Forrester
Visual Arts MFA
Columbia University School of the Arts
Graduates: 2024
Specialisms: Painting / Printmaking / Sculpture
My location: New York, United States
Aristotle Forrester
First Name: Aristotle
Last Name: Forrester
University / College: Columbia University School of the Arts
Course / Program: Visual Arts MFA
Graduates: 2024
Specialisms: Painting / Printmaking / Sculpture
My Location: New York, United States
About
Aristotle Forrester is a black painter and printmaker, originally from the South Side of Chicago and currently based in New York. He received his Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2016, and his Master of Fine Art from Columbia University, New York in 2024. Recent exhibitions include such venues as LatchKey Gallery (New York), Thierry Goldberg (New York), Frederic Snitzer (Miami), Storage Gallery (New York), M Fine Arts Galerie (Boston), the Inside Out Museum (Beijing), the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum (New York). His work can be found in the permanent collection of Harvard University (Boston). Forrester’s work unearths personal and historical evidence of racial injustice. Through deconstructing symbols such as the horseman, the flag, the mask and the fugitive, Forrester questions the racial constructs and power structures of intimidation that have defined his experience and that of so many other people of color living in America. By extending the traditions of quilting, collage, printmaking, pigment, and language, Forrester subverts the colonial pillars of visual culture and highlights the duality of imprisonment and freedom personified by these symbols. He presents his perspective on the human experience to viewers through the emotive power of pigment and gestural mark-making. Forrester creates these moments for viewers to stretch their subconscious, to push their understanding of imagery conjured through abstraction.
This body of work, Edicts of Blood and Water, visualizes the racial constructs and power structures that have defined Forrester’s experience and that of so many people of color living in America. In these paintings, he deploys the motifs of blood, water and land, elements that sustain human life yet have also been manipulated by those in power to shackle, oppress and subjugate. By extending the traditions of quilting, collage, pigment, and text in these pieces, Forrester subverts the colonial pillars of visual culture and highlights the duality of imprisonment and freedom personified by these symbols. This transition across these paintings embodies the conflict and calmness of conquest, tying together the concept of the origins of colonialism. It starts with an edict: go here, get them, bring them there. Over the course of the works, as over the course of time, the states of complexity of that edict are illuminated and unraveled, the tension of the marks presents the conflict, the loss, and the radical perseverance of oppression.
Competitions
