Lucia Simek reviews the exhibition Forrest Bess 100Years: Paintings by Forrest and His Friends at Kirk Hopper Fine Art, Dallas, on view through October 23, 2011. The show includes paintings by Bess, Chuck Webster, Andrew Masullo, and Chris Martin.

Simek writes: "Bess's work is powerful in its preciousness – aching with an intensity and fervor of ideas that, even for its size, challenges the monolithic works by his AB EX contemporaries at the mid-century,when most of his works on view here were made. Certainly, because of their scale, and the crude handmade frames, Bess's work immediately reads in an intimate, spiritually-leaded way."