CENTRAL FINE

 Frederic Tuten. Sweet Dreams

September 5th-October-October 3rd

Opening reception: September 8th, 6-8 pm.

CENTRAL FINE is pleased to announce Sweet Dreams, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Frederic Tuten. Painted between 2023 and 2024, the works—all oil on canvas—represent the continued evolution of Tuten’s unique and imaginative artistic enterprise.

 In some works, like Teatime in Tangier (2024) and Waiting by the River (2024), uncanny landscapes complete with trees, clouds, and mountains, seem to emerge from a mysterious nowhere with a horizon of color and shapes. Toeing the line between figuration and abstraction, Tuten’s paintings capture an amazing state of free-flowing thought. His paintings bring you to the edge of the unconscious where beauty lives.

The paintings at CENTRAL FINE have already garnered the strong support from the following:

“It is a joy looking at Tuten’s new paintings.”— T J Clark

 “Frederic Tuten’s visual world with its recurring motifs and riotous juxtapositions, is both instantly comprehended but surreally inexplicable. These paintings make you feel that you have just awoken from a fantastic and beautiful dream.” —Hans Ulrich Obrist

“Frederic Tuten’s paintings are entirely Tuten-esque, by which I mean joyful. I don’t know how, in these crazy and difficult times, he manages to summon so much inner festiveness.”— Deborah Solomon

“Traces of Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Pop are more like whispers than footprints. It is these intangibles that endow Tuten’s new and marvelous paintings with a deep and congenial sense of history and meaning. They are not entirely classifiable, but I would call it Intangibleism.”— Ernesto Quinonez

Frederic Tuten, (b. 1936, Bronx, NY) is a celebrated novelist, essayist, and visual artist. He studied at the Art Students League, City College of New York, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to receiving a Ph.D. in 19th-century American literature from New York University. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 Tuten’s paintings and drawings have been the subject of solo presentations: Victory, Central Fine, Miami Beach (2022); In the Fullness of Life, Harper’s Apartment, New York (2022); Works on Cardboard, Harper’s, East Hampton, NY (2021); and Flowers, Plants, and Other Romances, Planthouse Gallery, New York (2019). 

On a Terrace in Tangier – Works on Cardboard, a book of drawings and stories was published by in 2022 by König Books/KMEC Books, edited by Karen Marta with an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist.  Frederic Tuten is the co-author of the celebrated cult film, Possession. A facsimile of the annotated script will be published in the spring of 2024.

Tuten currently lives and works in New York City and Southampton, NY.