Cornelia Foss | Little Red: Artfully Captured Terror
This article was written by Nancy Prager-Kamel, Chairwoman of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States.
What would you do if you were eight years old and desperately running from the most fearful future imaginable… and how would you portray that 80 years later?
This polemic is addressed in the dichotomous imagery now on display at the Hirschel Adler Gallery:
The Fuller Building
41 East 57th Street
9th Floor
New York, NY 10022
212.535.8810. (through November 29,2025)
Cornelia Foss has lived—and in this exhibition vividly conveys—the terror of surviving as a child of mixed Jewish and Christian heritage who narrowly escaped Nazi Germany. This early trauma profoundly shaped both her life and artistic practice, and she continues to draw deeply from that harrowing departure from Berlin in the fall of 1939.
Foss is widely celebrated for her gestural, layered still lifes and her expansive, boundary-defying landscapes where sea and sky merge and collide. Yet in this exhibition, it is her intimate, biographical figurative works that take center stage, forming the emotional core of her visual storytelling.
This highly intimate exhibition is envisioned through Foss’ brilliant blend of realism and successful expressionism. Foss has masterfully utilized strong color and broad strokes to powerfully depict allegorical scenes from the childhood tale of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.
A member of the artistic and intellectual community of eastern Long Island and New York City, Foss has long been acknowledged as a creative spokesperson and standard bearer for expressive painting during the second half of the 20th century. Within her body of work she is celebrated for her tender portraits of people and beloved cats that roam through her home and studio.
However, as her biographical catalogue states, these ”Little Reds,” as the artist calls them, are a series of paintings executed over the past ten years that she considers intensely personal. Unlike her joyful seascapes, the “Little Reds” stand out for their moody, agitated aesthetic with a depth of emotion not found elsewhere in her oeuvre. These paintings draw from the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood; the story of a little girl and a “big, bad wolf” is the ultimate cautionary tale of good vs. evil, vulnerability and courage, the loss of innocence and the menace of power.
