Forrest Knight | Chimera

EXHIBITION DATES October 26, 2026 – January 8, 2027

RECEPTION Friday, November 13, 2026 at 5:30 PM

ARTIST

Forrest Knight is an art educator and painter based in Madbury, New Hampshire. He received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2013 and his MFA from New York University in 2024.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work moves fluidly between image and abstraction, using layered surfaces, collage sensibilities, and shifting visual fragments. My paintings draw from observation, digital collage, turns of phrase, strange peripheral visions, and the natural world. Everyday impressions—including media, memories, distractions, daydreams, stress, and the debris of daily life—shape my image-making process. Perception is filtered through screens, memory, and fantasy, creating paintings that feel both familiar and uncertain.

While my paintings often carry humor and playfulness on the surface, they are grounded by an awareness of the instability and absurdity of contemporary life. Drawing on the comic grotesque, I use comical and sometimes vulgar associations to explore power structures, shared anxieties, and emotional states such as fragility, insignificance, complicity, and burnout. Throughout the work, sincerity and irony, chaos and structure, memory and invention remain in constant tension.

I am deeply interested in paint itself—the immediacy of mark making, the physical act of painting, and the ways gestures can hold honesty, awkwardness, humor, or doubt.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC