Seth Michael Forman

Frosch & Co is pleased to present Men He Knew, Seth Michael Forman’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring recent paintings by the Brooklyn-and Kent, CT-based artist.

In this new body of work, Seth Michael Forman presents male figures as composite forms, built from distilled impressions of men he knew. Rather than portraits, the paintings translate partial and shifting memories into visual presence. The men inhabit atmospheric landscapes that do not depict specific places. These settings provide context for emotional states rather than geography, emphasizing the timeless and changing quality of memory.

The paintings are built over extended periods of time through repeated alterations and revisions. Each work accumulates many layers of paint. As Forman reworks, alters, and reconfigures the images, new memories emerge during the act of painting itself. Memories are rebuilt from fragments; details shift and change what is later remembered. Some pieces of memory fade, while others are reinterpreted. In this way, the physical process of painting mirrors the way memory works.

Some paintings, including Patriot or Salem Poor, reference historical individuals whose lives and qualities resonate with characteristics remembered from personal acquaintance. These figures are metaphorical actors, and the images remain deliberately nonliteral.

The men remembered while painting these works are no longer alive, or are no longer known to the artist. Some died tragically in their twenties, while others lived into old age. Their absence is part of the tension in the paintings: memory preserves what is lost while also altering it and creating something new.

The title Men He Knew places the subjects at a distance. The use of “He” rather than “I” signals both Forman’s past self and the way recollection turns lived experience into something mediated and retrospective.

Overall, Men He Knew explores the process of remembering—how memory keeps people present, transforms them, and re-creates them through time and through the ongoing act of looking back.

Seth Michael Forman was born in Brooklyn, New York. His paintings have been included in over fifty exhibitions, including “Picturing the Modern Amazon” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and have been featured on “State of the Arts,” a PBS broadcast. The New York Foundation for the Arts has twice awarded him a Painting Fellowship. He currently teaches Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.