Aristotle Forrester is a painter and printmaker whose work focuses on ancestral storytelling and the congruencies between the figure and landscape. His work relies on the use of his body and color to make gestural marks that animate perspective and create worlds of movement. As a black artist navigating the intersections of personal and collective history, he draws inspiration from the Yoruba and Afro-Caribbean spiritual landscape and palette, Jack Whitten’s use of self-made tools and paint to push the boundaries of abstract mark-making, and the depictions of external space, internal landscape and power structures invoked in Renaissance painting and printmaking.

Intertwining his traditional training with the diasporic origins of his ancestors, Forrester combines cultural symbols and processes to create images that expand the definition of abstraction to include his life perspective. Forrester’s images span a lattice of material and process. Leveraging hand-made paint from non-traditional pigments, printmaking techniques, textiles and collage, he creates images that expand painting’s lineage of conversation.

Forrester is based in New York. He received his Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2016 and his Master of Fine Art from Columbia University, New York in 2024. Forrester was recently an artist in residence at Silver Art Projects in New York. Recent exhibitions include such venues as Jessica Ann Peavy Gallery (New York), Untitled Art Fair (Miami), Frevo (New York), [CONTAINER] (Santa Fe), LatchKey Gallery (New York), Thierry Goldberg (New York), Frederic Snitzer (Miami), Storage Gallery (New York), M Fine Arts Galerie (Boston), the Inside Out Museum (Beijing), the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum (New York). His work can be found in the permanent collection of Harvard University (Boston).