Signs and Wonders

October 18th - November 16th

Known for his rebellious and exquisitely crafted paintings, Wisconsin artist Fred Stonehouse's sophisticated style draws on diverse cross-cultural influences and the spirit of outsider art. Signs and Wonders explores the unique and evocative blend of memory, mythology, and surrealism that has become Stonehouse's hallmark, offering viewers a glimpse into a world where the extraordinary meets the everyday. Stonehouse's contributions to the art world have solidified his status as a leading contemporary artist, and a storyteller who continues to push the boundaries of visual narrative.

Flower Paintings

October 18th - November 16th

Wisconsin artist, Laura Dronzek, is known for her masterful use of color and light, bringing a fresh perspective to the traditional genre of still life. Her paintings are characterized by a delicate balance of realism and abstraction, with each piece inviting viewers to explore intricate details and subtle nuances of her subjects. The flowers, whether blooming vibrantly or quietly fading, evoke a sense of tranquility and contemplation, drawing attention to the transient nature of her chosen subject.

In Response to Nature

September 14th - October 12th

Rodger Bechtold's oil paintings are a spirited celebration of the Midwestern landscape, marked by their exuberant colors and expressive brushwork. Influenced by his studies at the American Academy of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his mentorship under renowned painter Wolf Kahn, Bechtold's paintings balance realism and painterly interpretation. The artist's pieces evoke a sense of joy and vitality, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the beauty and tranquility of the Midwest. Through his expert use of color, light, and composition, Bechtold creates scenes that resonate with warmth and emotion, offering glimpses into the heart of the landscapes he portrays.

ROOMS

September 14th - October 12th

Flushed with color and finished with confident brushwork, Wisconsin artist Paula Swaydan Grebel's work demonstrates quiet moments of the everyday. In her latest series of small oil paintings on canvas and panel, she transports us to light-drenched rooms and intimate views of thoughtful still-life arrangements. Each painting is a testament to Swaydan Grebel's ability to capture the ephemeral, offering viewers a momentary glimpse into calm, domestic spaces. 

Summer in Wisconsin

July 19th - September 7th

"Summer in Wisconsin" highlights the extraordinary talent in Wisconsin art. This exhibition features paintings, drawings, sculpture, and photography by the state’s best-known contemporary artists.

As our largest exhibition of the year, "Summer in Wisconsin" includes over 100 new artworks from both established and emerging artists. This diverse collection showcases the creativity and mastery that define Wisconsin art.

In The Open Air

June 1 - July 13, 2024

Bethann Moran-Handzlik's paintings investigate the beauty of the natural world. A plein air artist, Bethann paints directly from nature all year long, including the cold winter months. Her preferred medium, oil paint, lends a discernable quality of truth to her work. The transparency, opacity, and ability for the paint to be worked and reworked inform the slow, observational approach to Moran-Handzlik's artwork.

Food and Fauna

June 1 - July 13, 2024

Chris Berti's sculptures of animals and everyday objects are created with methodical precision, honesty, and care. Utilizing and carving found ceramic drainage tiles, antique bricks, marble, and other various stones, Berti's creations reflect the wonder of the natural world. 

Sitting Still

April 19 - May 25, 2024

Wisconsin painter, Peter Gehrig, is an expert at finding beauty in the ordinary, infusing his canvases with a profound sense of tranquility and nostalgia. Drawing inspiration from the simple moments of everyday life, Gehrig effortlessly captures the essence of his subjects, transporting viewers to serene landscapes and inviting interiors.

Folklore

April 19 - May 25, 2024

Tory Folliard Gallery was pleased to present Laurie Hogin: Folklore, an exhibition of provocative paintings that explore themes of nature, consumerism, and human-animal relationships. Her use of vivid colors and meticulous attention to detail creates visually arresting compositions that invite viewers to delve deeper into the layers of meaning within each piece.

Chroma Color and Abstraction

February 10th - April 13th

CHROMA is an exhibition of contemporary painting and sculpture that focuses on color and abstraction. Each artist explores a variety of themes using line, color, and texture as their language of expression within their respective media.

FEATURED ARTISTS:

Derrick Buisch, Ben Grant, Michael Hedges, Anna Kunz, Caitlin Lempia-Bradford, Shane McAdams, Guzzo Pinc, Jeremy Popelka, Jason Rohlf, TL Solien, Richard Taylor, Stephanie Trenchard,

Wisconsin: In All Its Glory

March 16th - April 13th

Cathy Martin, a self-taught Wisconsin artist, creates stunning photo-realistic paintings recounting a long history of early mornings on the family farm. Each meticulous painting tells the story of a subtle longing for life little changed from generation to generation.

An Open Book: Conversation with Fred Stonehouse

Saturday, February 24th,

Fred Stonehouse led discussion exploring his paintings on repurposed book covers and the importance of tactile and material nature. You can view a small showcase of his book cover here.

Thoughts and Reflections

January 6th - February 3rd 2024

Dennis Nechvatal is a Madison-based painter who explores hyperreal landscapes with an emphasis on detail and color

Mark Mulhern -Conversations

October 20th - November 25th

Mark Mulhern is an American painter best known for his large figurative works capturing the human experience. In each piece, Mulhern encourages the viewer to enter his realm of real and imagined scenes where his characters engage in the simple acts of walking and conversing to more sumptuous moments of making party preparations and enjoying elegant gatherings.

Charles Munch -Night and Day

September 16th - October 14, 2023

Wisconsin artist, Charles Munch, creates vividly imagined paintings that explore the complex relationship between humans, animals, and the natural world. Eliminating extraneous details, Munch expresses emotion through color, line, and shape. His paintings of simplified forms, pulsing with life and color, create dramatic scenes of man and animal, friend and foe.

The Tory Folliard Gallery celebrates its 35th anniversary with a major Anniversary Exhibition showcasing new art by the many talented artists who made this occasion possible. This is the Gallery’s largest exhibition of the year featuring over one hundred works of art in painting, drawing, sculpture, and prints.

Exhibiting Artist

Rodger Bechtold, Mary Bero, Chris Berti, Craig Blietz, Caitlin Bradford, TD Brenner, Derrick Buisch, Jessica Calderwood, Mark Chatterley, El Gato Chimney, Robert Cocke, Marion Coffey, Laura Dronzek, Susan Stamm Evans, Mark Forth, Peter Gehrig, Ben Grant, Harold Gregor, Doug Hatch, Michael Hedge4s, Kathy Hofmann, Laurie Hogin, Ron Isaacs, Mary Jones, Claire Kellesvig, Flora Langlois, Cathy Martin, Bethann Moran-Handzlik, Mark Mulhern, Charles Munch, William Nichols, Dennis Nechvatal, Michael Noland, Russel Panczenko, Jeanette Pasin Sloan, Guzzo Pinc, Jeremy Popelka, Bill Reid, Jeffrey Ripple, Jason Rohlf, Jan Serr, George Shipperley, TL Solien, Paula Swaydan Grebel, Fred Stonehouse, Richard Taylor, Stephanie Trenchard, Tom Uttech, Russ Vogt, John Wilde, Robin Whiteman, Mary Alice Wimmer, and James Win

Robert Cocke - Safe Harbor

June 2 - July 8, 2023

Robert Cocke’s intimate paintings are like looking through enchanted keyholes and finding a magical world of wondrous beauty. Elements of the natural world are arranged into unnatural formations and improbable combinations resulting in surrealistic landscapes.  Currently living and working in Arizona, Cocke is awed and inspired by the mystery of nature and the enchantment of light.

Finding My Way

June 8 - July 10, 2023

Michael Hedges effortlessly combines color, line, and form, producing a dialogue of reverberating hues and mark-making in every painting. He has thoroughly absorbed the push-and-pull lessons of paint and dimensionality on a flat surface as if the work emerged alongside the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s. His love of painting is matched only by his tremendous skill and dedication.

Hedges grew up in the Chicago area and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before receiving his B.A. in Studio Art from Loras College in Dubuque. His work can be found in private and public collections throughout the United States.

Richard Taylor - New Work

April 21st - May 27th, 2023

Richard Taylor unites painting and sculpture using threedimensional metal forms as canvases for his painted finishes. Fleeting images of people, architecture, and signage, along with fragments of words and numbers are fused into souvenirs of the experiences and characters Taylor has encountered throughout his life.

Wisconsin has been home to Taylor since childhood, he earned both a BA in Art History and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.  His monumental public sculptures have earned him recognition throughout the country.

Derrick Buisch - Remarks on Colour

April 21 - May 27, 2023

Vibrating lines morph into playful symbols of pop culture and brilliant color combinations provide jolts of electric energy in paintings by Derrick Buisch.  Meant to be visually engaging and potentially unnerving, Buisch combines evocative imagery with moments of uneasy hilarity.

A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1997, Buisch has exhibited in many museums regionally and nationally.  He was awarded the 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors  and was a  Wisconsin Triennial Artist in 2014 and 2016.

George Shipperley - Expressions

January 28 - February 25, 2023

Based on years of observation of the natural world, George Shipperley merges memories of nature with his imagination to create a vision all his own. The artist applies multiple layers of oil pastel and occasionally employs a sgraffito technique to the work, creating expert layers of colors and forms. The finished works reveal poetic compositions rooted in realism and finished with the immediacy of abstract expressionism. 

A native of Illinois, Shipperley studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Aurora University. His works are in public and private collections throughout the United States.

Guzzo Pinc - NOMOS

January 6 - February 25, 2023

Wisconsin painter, Guzzo Pinc, showed a voracious interest in the visual arts from a very early age which led him to study and copy works ranging from skateboarding graphics to canonical paintings of art history. He majored in chemistry in college but switched to art history at the last minute, a degree that offered little in terms of financial stability. 

For the next two decades painting became his single form of consistency as he struggled with itinerance and personal issues. Finally, opportunities began to arise after he was "discovered" on Instagram by faculty members of UW-Madison's painting program who encouraged him to enroll in the MFA program. 

After completing his MFA, Guzzo was offered representation by galleries in the Midwest and included in international shows and museum exhibitions. His work continues to become known in larger and larger circles throughout the world.

Throughout this strange journey, Guzzo Pinc has come to respect and be influenced by sources that are considered very "low" and ones that are very "high", ranging from graffiti and comic books to the canonical artists of the Western and Eastern traditions --and it is this blending of such a diverse range of influences and experiences that gives his painting its unique style.

Mary Bero - Strange Days

December 3 - 31, 2022

 Wisconsin artist Mary Bero breaks all the traditional rules of fiber art. She weaves what she calls "tapestry paintings." Her primary technique is to hand-stitch cotton or silk thread or floss to a cloth backing, simultaneously building up areas of color and texture that form striking images and patterns when seen together. Sometimes Bero augments these methods with acrylics, cloth, or paper, creating primitive explosions of vibrant color and emotion. This new body of work includes a multi-themed series of Ideograms sewn on black fabric.

Bero's subject matter may seem simple and direct; freely-rendered human faces and forms, animals and plants, repeated shapes and patterns. However, her artistic choices and technical execution reveal dimensions of subtlety and refinement that belie such impressions of thematic simplicity. As the viewer moves closer to one of Bero's pieces, the complexity and variety of her surfaces become increasingly evident.

Bero's work has been shown in exhibitions across the nation over her thirty-plus-year span of art-making. She is a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and is in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI; Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, and more.

John Wilde - Love & Death

December 3 - 31, 2022

Tory Folliard Gallery celebrates the work of Wisconsin artist John Wilde with Love and Death, an exhibition of his paintings and drawings from 1940-2005.  

John Wilde’s work constantly balances life with death. These elements were most frequently integrated, side-by-side, or embodied through objects or figures betraying one foot in ecstasy and the other in the tomb. His attention to their embrace comes through the ripeness of fruits and inquisitiveness of insects from his garden, runs through the flight of birds and their songs, is overlaid upon his reflection, hides in the smile of frolicking naked ladies, and rests in the crisp glow of talismanic objects.

-- Robert Cozzolino

John Wilde (1919-2006) was a leader in the American surrealism movement known as Magic Realism. He was a consummate draftsman employing Renaissance painting and drawing techniques in his compositions. He was known for his beautiful and bizarre subject matter, and his adoration of the natural world. Wilde's ideas of life and death interact contrapuntally, or, as Wilde put it more bluntly, "from sex to the awareness of death." 

Wilde's work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Walker Art Center, Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Portland Art Museum, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others.

The Tory Folliard Gallery has represented John Wilde's art since 1993.

Catalog with essay by Robert Cozzolino will accompany this exhibition.

Anne Siems - Muse

October 21 - November 26, 2022

Anne Siems' watercolor paintings take on a distinct and powerful posture in her new body of work - Muse. The exhibition presents an intimate look at exposed female figures whose bodies are marked with tattoos of fables, myths, and poems. Their poses and baldness express a vulnerability not of victimhood, but of the strength and courage found in today's women. 

Born in Berlin, Anne Siems lives and works in Seattle. Her drawings and paintings can be found in numerous collections across the country, including the Tacoma Art Museum, Arkansas Art Center, Boise Art Museum, Museum for Contemporary Art & Design- Kansas City,  Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Microsoft, Nordstrom, and Hallmark Collection among others.

Craig Blietz - Haul Road

October 21 - November 26, 2022

Craig Blietz creates masterful paintings of farm animals and rural imagery that observe the quiet beauty of agrarian life.

In the new body of work, Haul Road, Blietz reflects on his time spent on a Wisconsin farm. Shortly after the artist's visit the property was sold and destined for residential development.  With his usual cast of domestic farm animals, Blietz replays the reductive imaginings he experienced during his visit to that farm.

Craig Blietz received his BS from the University of Denver and continued his art and design studies at the Harrington College of Design.  He completed his formal studies with academic training at the School of Representational Art in Chicago.

Selected Collections

Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, WI; Miller Art Museum, Sturgeon Bay, WI;  JB and MK Pritzker Collection in the Governor’s Mansion, Springfield, IL; Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; Dohmen Company, Milwaukee, WI;  Sprint Corporation, Kansas City, MO; NiSource of Indiana, Merrillville, IN;   West Bend Mutual Insurance Company, West Bend, WI

T.L. Solien - Interiors, Exteriors, and Divided Lights

September 16 - October 15, 2022

 Landscapes are often the setting and the stage upon which TL Solien’s doleful characters experience significant changes or depart on life-changing journeys. Solien's new body of work, "Interiors, Exteriors, and Divided Lights" continues this tradition by pulling viewers into his disquieting orbit of sardonic scenes through his compositions of impeccable narratives charged with signs, symbols, and tropes mimicking socio-political culture.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1949, Solien earned a BFA from Moorhead State University, Moorhead Minnesota, and an MFA in Painting and Sculpture from the University of Nebraska.  He is the recipient of many honors and awards including the Whitney Biennial Exhibition, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in Painting. 

Solien’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions across the country and is included in public and private collections around the world.  

Selected collections include: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art;  Minneapolis Institute of Art; Tate Gallery, London;  National Gallery of Australia; Singapore Art Museum, among others.

Of Nature

July 15 - September 10, 2022

Of Nature lies between the boundaries of the physical and the imaginary realms.  Glimpses of ephemera and captivations of the natural world are represented in painting, photography, sculpture, and works on paper by thirty-two Midwest artists.

Participating Artists include: 

Chris Berti, Christina Bothwell, TD Brenner, Mark Chatterley, El Gato Chimney, Emma Daisy, Laura Dronzek, Kathy Hofmann, Laurie Hogin, Ron Isaacs, Claire Kellesvig, Flora Langlois, Veronica Mortellaro, Mark Mulhern, Katie Musolff, Dennis Nechvatal, William Nichols, Michael Noland, Judy Onofrio, Russell Panczenko, Bill Reid, Jeffrey Ripple, Jan Serr, George Shipperley, Aniela Sobieski, Fred Stonehouse, Robin Whiteman, Tom Uttech, John Wilde, Jonathan Wilde, Mary Alice Wimmer, and James Winn. 

Jeanette Pasin Sloan - New Paintings

June 4 - July 9, 2022

Jeanette Pasin Sloan's paintings, drawings, and prints display technical feats of virtuosity. Pasin Sloan works primarily in still lifes, which she describes as, “between realism and abstraction, knowing and unknowing, and order and disorder.” Her work’s main focus is not the objects that she paints, but the reflections in the objects. These reflections take on their own life, subverting both genre and style, infusing the traditional genre of still life painting with highly abstract tendencies. Closely-cropped, and set in carefully manipulated compositions, the subject matter of Pasin Sloan's work takes second stage to its formal intensity. Pasin Sloan’s work seeks to depict a world of harmony and order, despite the knowledge of chaos.