Vanishing Point, a new suite of paintings and watercolors, is conceived from unexpected perspectives, collapsing the boundary between the viewer and the world we inhabit. Tree canopies, jellyfish and coral reefs, and spectacular flora all tower above the viewer. These works embody Alexis Rockman’s career-long interest in biodiversity, with a naturalist's keen awareness and enthusiasm for the natural world. Rockman also continues his career-long dialogue with the history of art with the thick impasto found within the paintings and the deft manipulation and fluidity of watercolor. There is a hallucinatory and fluid quality to the cacophony of color found in the watercolors, coupled with the more physical use of paint in the paintings.

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The large-scale watercolors in this show are amongst the largest ever executed by the artist. Examining the euphoria, psychedelia, and enchantment of experiencing nature, these works encourage the viewer to set aside fatalism in favor of an energetic appreciation for being alive on this spectacular planet.

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Vanishing Point will be on view at the gallery in tandem with the artist’s two-person exhibition with Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman, A Journey to Nature’s Underworld, which opened at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami on February 13th and will be on view through July 19th. This 35-year survey show of these two renowned artists traveled from the Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY) after stops at The Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT) and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach, VA).

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The paintings and watercolors in our show, like the works concurrently on view at The Lowe, are a compendium of Rockman’s nearly four-decade career. He has mined as source material his incredible breadth of research trips taken over the years, ranging from Guyana, Antarctica, and Madagascar to the American West and the South Pacific. Yet, in this body of work, Rockman has imbued a more directly personal element: in recent years, he struggled with vertigo, which has had a profound influence on the point of view of his images. Rockman shifts his perspectival approach, frequently removing any semblance of horizon line. Particularly with Medusozoa, Dragon Fruit, and Mountain Pass – the watercolors each measuring over six feet tall – our experience is immersive, collapsing the bounds and encouraging an immediacy with the composition depicted. Rockman’s mastery of watercolor, where control must oft be foregone to the pigment’s own devices, reminds us that these works are nature as captured by his hand. 

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Whereas the watercolors in Vanishing Point tend to showcase nature in all its unencumbered splendor, Redwoods and Cecropia, the two paintings exhibited, more directly elucidate the message which Rockman has espoused throughout his career: the persistent and ever-increasing threat posed by human activity on the world’s biodiversity. With a nod to Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church and rendered here, too, through a collapsed perspective, we are confronted with something awry: flames flicker and plumes of smoke start to take shape. Monumental are the trees, rendered in lush impasto with cold wax heightening the textured effect.  Monumental, too, is the scale of the fires ravaging our ecosystems. These two paintings ground us in the present, demonstrating Alexis Rockman’s active pursuit as an environmental activist while reflecting upon the grandeur of the natural world.