First major UK show of American painter Forrest Bess explores in-between spaces — review

At first glance, Forrest Bess’s 1946 painting “Untitled (The Dicks)” looks nothing like its title suggests. One of his earliest visionary paintings — inspired by images that occurred to Bess in moments between waking and sleeping — it is a repeating pattern of ovals in orangey yellow, a few flecks of the canvas’s black background left untouched.

This is one of the first works encountered in Out of the Blue, a retrospective at Camden Art Centre in north London for the mid-20th-century American painter and the first major institutional exhibition of his work in the UK. The piece captures Bess at both his most compelling and his most enigmatic; his work comes to life when it exists at an uncertain point between abstract and figurative, between the real world and the artist’s subconscious.

While painting was a fixture throughout Bess’s life, he was never a full-time artist. Born in Bay City, Texas in 1911, he began painting as a teenager, taught by a neighbour. In 1931 he enrolled to study architecture at the University of Texas, but found himself drawn to texts on religion, psychology and anthropology, which would come to define his work as an artist. After dropping out of college in 1932 and working in the Beaumont oilfields, he set up a painting studio two years later in Bay City. After the second world war, during which Bess enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers, he returned to a family fishing camp in Chinquapin. It was here that he developed the symbolic, personal work that came to define his later life.

Despite Bess’s deeply personal visual language, informed by life as a gay man in rural Texas, and despite his radical ideas about sex and gender, his work was shown during the 1950s and 1960s in the mainstream Betty Parsons Gallery, which represented other abstract artists including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. While it might be tempting to think of Bess’s work in the context of those contemporaries, the range of sources that he drew on — from eastern spirituality to a (largely one-sided) correspondence with the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung — makes him singular.

Some paintings explicitly capture his mental landscape. Another early work, 1947’s “Untitled (The Crowded Mind/The Void)” presents a series of symbols cluttered together (geometric shapes, the sun, an aeroplane) with a chunk of the canvas cut off by a wave of black, as if there are ideas that the artist is unable to render. Some of these symbols recur like signs on a map — arrows and triangles, leading your eye somewhere far beyond the gallery — as Bess tries to make sense of uncharted territory that is both physical and metaphysical.

In many ways, Bess’s work feels transitional, not only in the way that it moves between states of consciousness and unconsciousness, but also in how he tried to make sense of his own body through painting, writing and medical intervention. Through surgery, Bess became what was known then as a “pseudohermaphrodite” — having, in his case, biologically male chromosomal tissue but the external genitalia of someone biologically female. (The term has become outdated; “intersex” is now preferred.)

For Bess, this was vital for reaching a state of what he considered to be transcendence. His work gestures towards this feeling: “Tree of Light/Sign of the Hermaphrodite” (1953) offers the first half of its title like a fork in the road, black branches on a grey background. But at the midpoint of the canvas, it moves from the tangible reality of the tree towards a more abstract space: a golden background, with Bess’s “sign of the hermaphrodite” — a small oval of orange and red, like a fireball — aligned with the branches. It gives a sense of the known world suddenly disappearing as Bess tries to make sense of it through something more abstract.

The motifs that keep Bess’s work grounded in the real world — doorways, arrows, the branches of his Tree of Light — are the best way to make sense of the symbolic, subjective realm that the artist kept returning to, fragments of a map that was never quite completed.

There’s something fitting about the final painting in the exhibition, “Here is a Sign” (1970): its yellow arrows on black feel like a road sign as they point towards a dead end, finally turning in circles. It’s an image that captures both Bess’s continued desire to articulate his visions and the seeming impossibility of bringing them into the real world, fully formed. Like the artist himself, his paintings linger somewhere in between, uncertain and just out of reach.

To January 15 2023, camdenartcentre.org