Gregory Gillespie Roman Interior (Still Life)
At Forum Gallery
By: Forum - Sep 19, 2025
Forum Gallery is pleased to present Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000), an exhibition celebrating the art and life of the American artist. The exhibition is on view now and continues through Saturday, November 8th.
Following his studies at Cooper Union in New York and the San Francisco Art Institute, Gregory Gillespie left the United States for Italy where he spent eight years supported by a Fulbright grant and three consecutive Chester Dale fellowships that allowed him to study Renaissance painting, especially Masaccio and Crivelli, whilst living at the American Academy in Rome. There, Gillespie’s complex, psychologically charged paintings depicting genre scenes rooted in Old Masters technique, punctuated by twentieth-century anxiety and executed in Gillespie’s unique combination of collage and trompe l’oeil techniques, emerged in full force.
Back in New York, his Italian paintings were first exhibited by Forum Gallery in 1966, with a second exhibition soon after in 1968. An American audience and the New York press immediately took notice of Gillespie’s unique, visionary works painted with his consummate skill and unerring eye for detail.
The Roman trattorias were a powerful inspiration for Gillespie and in 1966 he painted Roman Interior (Still Life). The painting won the Medaglia d’Oro del Senato della Repubblica (the first prize award in a competition open to foreign artists painting recollections of Rome in figurative works of art) before shipping to the US for inclusion in the 1967 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and then by Forum Gallery during Gillespie’s solo exhibition immediately following in January 1968.
In her review of Forum Gallery’s 1968 exhibition, Rosalind Browne wrote for ArtNews, “Gregory Gillespie, a formidable young virtuoso who has lived in Rome on grants for the past four years, loads twentieth-century pornography, trompe l’oeil and discreet plaster montage into a highly enameled, explosive sixteenth-century Flemish package. The setting is Roman, the aura is Bosch, the concept is literary.”
Roman Interior (Still Life) was later included in the retrospective granted to Gillespie by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1977, loaned by Jacob and Alice M. Kaplan of New York who acquired the work in 1967.
???FORUM GALLERY
475 Park Avenue at 57th Street
New York, NY 10022
(212) 355 – 4545
forumgallery.com