The following viewing rooms showcase artwork that was part of Tory Folliard Gallery’s 2025 Of Nature Exhibition.
TOM UTTECH
Wisconsin native Tom Uttech creates evocative landscape paintings that feed our expectations of the wilderness—raw and wild, yet familiar and welcoming. His work captures a world of waterways, rugged shorelines, tumbling rocks, and dense thickets, blending both real and imagined elements into richly layered scenes. Uttech draws inspiration from his travels to Northern Minnesota and Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park, places that deeply inform the atmosphere of his paintings.
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BETHANN MORAN-HANDZLIK
Wisconsin-born painter Bethann Moran-Handzlik creates expressive, lyrical paintings grounded in direct observation and memory. Working outdoors in every season and also in the studio, she captures fleeting, poetic moments with joyous brushwork and a deep sensitivity to light and form.Her subjects range from winter forests to sunlit gardens and intimate still lifes, reflecting both attentive observation and emotional resonance. Whether painting in the field or recalling a moment from memory, Moran-Handzlik’s work is an act of presence—honoring the vitality of life in all its beauty and impermanence.
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CHRIS BERTI
Berti’s recent work consists of human and animal figures carved from found wooden objects and old bricks. Carving allows him to retain part of an iconic form while emphasizing the rendered image on the top portion. On a functional level, the uncarved portion serves as a pedestal to elevate the importance of the figure; on a conceptual level the uncarved portion’s nostalgic shape adds to the ethos of the figure. The figures, often in meditative, inward, and isolated poses, synthesize with the balanced form on which they stand or rest. The warm, aged surface of the wood and brick suggest time and memory.
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GEORGE SHIPPERLEY
Based on years of observation of the natural world, George Shipperley merges memories of nature with his imagination to create a vision all his own. The artist applies multiple layers of oil pastel and a sgraffito technique to each piece, creating an expert sense of poetry throughout the composition. The finished works reveal the immediacy of abstract expressionism with a solid ground of realism.
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WILLIAM NICHOLS
In William Nichols' large-scale paintings, the viewer is immersed within a lushly blooming garden or a densely wooded forest. It is a contemporary look at landscape generated out of American traditions of realism.
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MICHAEL NOLAND
Michael Noland's paintings are based on traditional American scenes that are molded to his unique vision. Through Intense, obsessive, dramatic, and Scrupulous repetition of line and saturated colors, Noland transforms common views and unique animals into darkly surreal and amusing scenes that question our relationship to the natural world. Flowers pulsate with life, and colors reverberate with an electric charge. Almost fastidious wavy patterns create vitality through exaggeration in form, turning the 3D world into a 2D pattern.