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Dramatic glacier cliffs, painted in craggy daubs of blue and white, tower above the ocean all through Alexis Rockman’s portentous exhibition, Melancolia at Sperone Westwater. Every portray, in oil and chilly wax on wooden, depicts one among two scenes: a historic arctic shipwreck, such because the freight and passenger ship Ancon’s 1889 crash close to Alaska, or an ablating glacier. Each sorts of scene fixate on a second of loss, portraying the ship’s impression with the ice or the glacier’s runoff as kinetic bursts of paint. The stunning visible resemblance between these two completely different topics underscores maritime exploration’s historic function in modern ecological decline, whereas additionally romanticizing that decline.
Rockman has painted a chic arctic panorama earlier than — the gargantuan “South” (2008), which spans virtually 30 ft in size throughout seven items of gessoed paper — however the artist sometimes works in a surreal, virtually comedian register. The vast majority of his acclaimed landscapes think about fantastical eco-dystopian futures, with cross-sectional above-and-below–water compositions that resemble sure pure historical past museum dioramas, during which unique animals teem amid the ruins of human civilization. Melancolia’s glacier work, in distinction, supply no glimpses of what lies beneath the water’s floor and are virtually devoid of human or animal presence, with even the crashing ships rendered invisible behind clouds of kicked up snow. A small lone kayak often dots the work’ foreground waters, the type of element generally current in Hudson River College work to convey the grandeur of nature’s scale.
That Hudson River College affect finds its most telling expression in Rockman’s “The Wreck of the Ancon” (2023), which alludes to Albert Bierstadt’s late-career portray, “Wreck of the ‘Ancon’ in Loring Bay, Alaska” (1889). Bierstadt was truly a passenger aboard the Ancon when it crashed into an iceless harbor reef; after being rescued, he spent the subsequent week drawing research of the wreck from a close-by seaside. His portray of the scene is uncharacteristically prosaic: beneath a colorless sky, the Ancon lists, sleepily, close to the shore. Rockman’s model is just not solely extra theatrical, with a big spray of snow depicting the crash itself, but additionally fictionalized, reimagining the crash as occurring towards an imposing glacier. This artistic liberty encapsulates Melancolia’s stylized unhappiness, the best way its arctic work painting loss as sudden and spectacular. Such ominous magnificence makes it laborious to understand the various gradual, peculiar steps on the trail to break down.
Alexis Rockman: Melancolia continues at Sperone Westwater (257 Bowery, Decrease East Facet, Manhattan) by July 28. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
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