Dramatic glacial cliffs, painted in craggy dabs of blue and white, tower above the sea throughout Alexis Rockman’s awe-inspiring exhibition, Melancholy at Sperone Westwater. Each painting, in oil and cold wax on wood, depicts one of two scenes: a historic shipwreck in the Arctic, such as the crash of the cargo and passenger ship Ancon in 1889 near Alaska , or an ablating glacier. Both types of scenes fixate on a moment of loss, depicting the ship’s impact with ice or glacier runoff as kinetic paint chips. The startling visual resemblance between these two different subjects highlights the historical role of maritime exploration in contemporary ecological decline, while romanticizing that decline.
Rockman has painted a sublime arctic landscape before – the gargantuan ‘South’ (2008), which stretches almost 30 feet across seven pieces of gesso paper – but the artist generally works in a surreal, almost comedic register. The majority of his acclaimed landscapes imagine fantastical eco-dystopian futures, with cross-sectional compositions above and below water that resemble some natural history museum dioramas, in which exotic animals swarm amid ruins of human civilization. MelancholyPaintings of glaciers, on the other hand, offer no glimpse of what lies beneath the surface of the water and are almost devoid of human or animal presence, even crashing ships are rendered invisible behind clouds. of kicked up snow. A small, solitary kayak occasionally dots the paintings’ foreground waters, the kind of detail sometimes present in Hudson River School paintings to convey the grandeur of nature’s scale.
This Hudson River School influence finds its most telling expression in Rockman’s “The Wreck of the Ancon” (2023), which alludes to Albert Bierstadt’s late-career painting, “Wreck of the ‘Ancon’ in Loring Bay, Alaska” (1889). Bierstadt was actually a passenger aboard the Ancon when it crashed on an ice-free reef in the harbour; after being rescued, he spent the next week drawing studies of the wreckage from a nearby beach. His painting of the scene is unusually prosaic: under a dull sky, the Ancon slumbers, sleepy, near the shore. Rockman’s version is not only more theatrical, with a large spray of snow representing the accident itself, but also fictional, reimagining the accident as happening against a towering glacier. This creative freedom encompasses Melancholythe stylized sadness of , the way his arctic paintings depict loss as sudden and dramatic. Such disturbing beauty makes it difficult to perceive the many gradual and ordinary steps on the way to collapse.
Alexis Rockman: Melancholy continues at Sperone Westwater (257 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through July 28. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
