At Sea | Viewing Room | David Zwirner

Bas Jan Ader
Francis Alÿs
Harold Ancart
Diane Arbus
Lucas Arruda
Peder Balke
Max Beckmann
Marcel Broodthaers
Cecily Brown
Vija Celmins
Anne Collier
Gustave Courbet
Tacita Dean
Thierry De Cordier
James Ensor
Cy Gavin
Susan Hiller
Katsushika Hokusai
Gustave Le Gray
L.S. Lowry
Frank Moore
Oscar Murillo
Raymond Pettibon
Herbert Ponting
Loïc Raguénès
Alexis Rockman
Léon Spilliaert
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Paul Thek
Wolfgang Tillmans
J. M. W. Turner
Cy Twombly
Not Vital

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.

—Matthew Arnold, To Marguerite: Continued

Whether in the awesome forms of the legendary floods in Gilgamesh and Genesis, or via the more delightful but ultimately crueler torment of Homer’s Mediterranean, the sea is among art’s oldest subjects. For millennia humans have been fascinated and horrified in equal measure by mystery, eternity, and danger of which the sea seems to be a mirror: sometimes enigmatically placid, sometimes jagged with sudden storms.

Dating from the nineteenth century to the present, these works differ in media and approach, but together, they ask social, political, and environmental questions that resonate forcefully today.

Diane Arbus

Girl emerging from the ocean in curlers, Coney Island, N.Y. 1963

Gelatin silver print

Image: 7-7/8 x 6-7/8 inches (20 x 17.5 cm)
Sheet: 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)

Tacita Dean

Horizon/Rain/Filthy Weather, 1998

Three (3) silkscreen prints on paper

Each: 27 1/2 x 39 3/8 inches (70 x 100 cm)

Edition of 60

“Some things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawn at all, but only surfed.”

—Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Big gun pen. ...), 2020 (detail)

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Big gun pen. ...), 2020 (detail)

Raymond Pettibon

No Title (Big gun pen. ...), 2020

Acrylic and gouache on paper

52 x 100 3/4 inches (132.1 x 255.9 cm)

Joseph Mallord William Turner

Sea View, c. 1826

Bodycolor on blue paper

5 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches (13.5 x 19 cm)

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Sea View, National Galleries of Scotland

“Dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions—(completing thus the perfect system of all truth, which we have shown to be formed by Turner’s works)—the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable Sea.”

—John Ruskin

Cecily Brown

Untitled (Shipwreck), 2017

Oil on linen

31 x 43 inches (78.7 x 109.2 cm)

“Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet ... then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.”

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Katsushika Hokusai

The Poem of Sangi Takamura (Ono no Takamura), c. 1835-1836

Color woodblock print: ōban yoko-e

9 7/8 x 14 3/8 inches (25.1 x 36.5 cm)

Cy Twombly

Lepanto I, II, III, 1996

Set of three (3) monotypes on light eggshell colored Japon paper

Sheet, each: 39 3/8 x 24 3/8 inches (100 x 61.9 cm)
Framed, each: 46 7/8 x 32 1/2 inches (119.1 x 82.6 cm)

Lepanto I: Edition of 10, 4 AP
Lepanto II: Edition of 11, 4 AP
Lepanto III: Edition of 12, 4 AP

“His paintings readily move from the elegiac to the confrontational, to the homoerotic, to the humorous, to a blend of all these states of mind and more: never melodramatic or morose, they are always direct…. Moore’s Venus flaunts a mermaid tail, her birth an eruption from a contaminated ocean…. [She] is the then well-known drag queen and gender illusionist Lady Bunny, the transvestite successor to Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn of Warhol fame in the 1960s and 1970s. We find Lady Bunny engaged simultaneously in erotic play, with her come-hither gaze, and prophecy, as spokeswoman of ecological and medical despair.”

—Klaus Kertess, Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore

Frank Moore

Birth of Venus, 1993

Oil on linen on panel with gilt antique frame

51 1/4 x 73 1/4 inches (130.2 x 186.1 cm)

Paul Thek

Untitled (Sea Series), 1975

Enamel, acrylic, and gesso on newspaper

26 3/8 x 31 3/4 inches (67 x 80.5 cm)

“I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at the moment.’’

—Paul Thek, 1977

As the writer Guy de Maupassant observed during a visit with Courbet in Étretat,
“In a great bare room a fat, dirty, greasy man was spreading patches of white paint on a big bare canvas with a kitchen-knife. From time to time he went and pressed his face against the window pane to look at the storm. The sea came up so close that it seemed to beat right against the house, which was smothered in foam and noise. The dirty water rattled like hail against the window and streamed down the walls. On the mantelpiece was a bottle of cider and a half-empty glass. Every now and then Courbet would swig a mouthful and then go back to his painting. It was called The Wave and it made a sensation around the world.”

Gustave Courbet

La Vague (The Wave), c. 1869-1870

Oil on canvas

25 1/4 x 32 inches (64.1 x 81.3 cm)

“The sea! The sea!... In her fury which growls, she reminds me of a caged monster who can devour me.”

—Gustave Courbet, in a letter to Victor Hugo, 1864

Gustave Le Gray

Effet de soleil dans les nuages - Océan, Normandy, c. 1856-1857

Albumen print from a wet collodion negative

12 1/4 x 15 7/8 inches (31.1 x 40.2 cm)

“In my point of view, the artistic beauty of a photographic print consists ... almost always in the sacrifice of certain details in such a manner as to produce an effect which sometimes attains to the sublime in art.”

—Gustave Le Grey

Vija Celmins, Ocean Surface Wood Engraving 2000, 2000 (detail)

Vija Celmins, Ocean Surface Wood Engraving 2000, 2000 (detail)

Vija Celmins

Ocean Surface Wood Engraving 2000, 2000

Wood engraving on Zerkall paper

Plate: 8 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches (21 x 26 cm)
Sheet: 20 3/4 x 17 1/4 inches (52.7 x 43.8 cm)

Edition of 75

L.S. Lowry

The Grey Sea, 1964

Oil on canvas

29 1/2 x 39 5/8 inches (75 x 100.5 cm)

Léon Spilliaert

Marine met strand en wandelaars, 1913

Pastel on paper

12 7/8 x 17 3/8 inches (32.9 x 44 cm)

Léon Spilliaert, Marine met strand en wandelaars, 1913 (detail)

Léon Spilliaert, Marine met strand en wandelaars, 1913 (detail)

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband’s

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is
like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name
in every gull’s outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility
will never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore
now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,
since Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough
from whose groundswell the great hexameters come
to the conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

—Derek Walcott, Sea Grapes

Peder Balke

Fra Nordkapp, 1853

Oil on panel on board

14 1/4 x 19 7/8 inches (36.2 x 50.5 cm)

“[My work] is based on ideas of science. It doesn’t just privilege the subjective. It uses subjectivity informed by history to create this hybrid language. I want it to be almost impossible to look at and impossible not to look at.”

—Alexis Rockman

Alexis Rockman, Terminus, 2020 (detail)

Alexis Rockman, Terminus, 2020 (detail)

Alexis Rockman

Terminus, 2020

Oil and wax on wood panel

48 x 40 inches (121.9 x 101.6 cm)

Herbert Ponting

Midnight in the Antarctic Summer , 1911

Carbon print

20 7/8 x 29 3/8 inches (53 x 74.5 cm)

Thierry De Cordier, MER DU NORD, Étude n°1, 2011 (detail)

Thierry De Cordier, MER DU NORD, Étude n°1, 2011 (detail)

“It is as if [Thierry De Cordier] seems to wander through life, in the darkness of the earth, in the fire and the water, searching for the ultimate still life of our soul and our cosmos.”

—Jan Hoet

Thierry de Cordier

MER DU NORD, Étude n°1, 2011

Oil paint and enamel on canvas

47 1/4 x 59 inches (120 x 150 cm)

Harold Ancart

Untitled, 2020

Oil stick and graphite on paper in artist's frame

52 x 61 1/2 inches (132.1 x 156.2 cm)

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Arctic Ocean, Nord Kapp II, 1989

Gelatin silver print

Sheet: 19 x 24 inches
(48.3 x 61 cm)
Mount: 20 x 25 inches
(50.8 x 63.5 cm)
Framed: 30 x 34 7/8 inches
(76.2 x 88.6 cm)

Edition of 25

“The marine horizon, an epitome of flatness, vastness, and distance, and therefore of basic orientation. In photograph after photograph, the horizon line precisely bisects the image, dividing two basic elements that lie outside our visual scope—water and air—into two optically equal but identical halves.”

—Thomas Kellein in Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Exposed

“Medicinal sea, west-national sea, adored mother, I want in a fresh bouquet, without surrealist ways, to celebrate your one hundred faces, your surfaces, your facets, your dimples, your Rubescent bottoms, your diamond crests, your sapphire tops, your qualities, your delights, your profound charms.”

—James Ensor

James Ensor

La Grande Marine, 1885

Oil on canvas

44 7/8 x 63 3/8 inches (114 x 161 cm)

Loïc Raguénès

Labre palloni, 2020

Tempera on canvas

72 1/2 x 90 1/2 inches (184 x 230 cm)

“Lacrimae rerum: there are tears at the heart of things.”

—From Virgil’s Aeneid, translation by Seamus Heaney. Chosen by Loïc Raguénès

In his characteristically poetic mode, Francis Alÿs can be seen silently gathering water into a bucket from the shore of the Black Sea in Trabzon, Turkey, and later pouring it into the Red Sea, at a beach in Aqaba, Jordan. A seemingly simple action, Watercolor acquires deeper symbolic significance considering the political and religious hostilities in the region, where freedom of movement and interaction with neighbors are sometimes restricted.

Francis Alÿs

Watercolor

Turkey - Aqaba, Jordan, 2010

Video, 1:20min

Francis Alÿs. This work is part of Creative Commons.

Anne Collier

Studio Sunset, 2007

Chromogenic print

50 x 63 inches (127 x 160 cm)

Edition of 5, 2 AP

Pinning the poster against a white wall with black carpet visible below, Collier creates the illusion of a second horizon and opens the frame to include the space of the studio, which functions as a theatrical stage for the things the artist shoots. As the critic Dan Fox notes: “The types of images that Collier uses mostly share the same pop-cultural emptiness, just specific enough to intrigue—someone crying, a gorgeous sunset— but also generic enough to allow any individual to invest their own emotions in them.”

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2018

Oil on canvas

11 3/4 x 14 5/8 inches (30 x 37 cm)

“It’s common to view my work through the lens of the sublime, but it’s more complex than that. My work is informed at a technical level by certain landscape painting, in the use of color and brushwork, for example, or Constable’s clouds, which are the best in that tradition. But those painters were observing nature.‘‘

—Lucas Arruda

Susan Hiller

Rough Dawns II, 2015

Archival pigment prints, in twelve (12) parts

Each: 20 1/8 x 30 1/8 inches (51.2 x 76.6 cm)
Overall dimensions: 60 1/2 x 120 5/8 inches (153.7 x 306.4 cm)

Wolfgang Tillmans

Ultrachrome, 2014

Inkjet print on paper mounted on aluminum in artist's frame

27 5/8 x 36 1/4 inches (70.2 x 92.1 cm)

Edition of 3, 1 AP

Marcel Broodthaers

Un Voyage en Mer du Nord, 1974

16mm film, 4:15 min, color, silent

Overall dimensions vary with installation

“At a Paris flea market in the rue Jacob of the 1970s, Marcel Broodthaers purchased a nineteenth-century French amateur painting of a fishing boat. Un tableau représentant le retour d’un bateau de pêche (A Painting Representing the Return of a Fishing Boat) formed the subject of several works by Broodthaers, including an artist’s book and a 16mm film edition titled Un voyage en mer du nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), in which different media are deployed to ‘analyze’ details of the banal maritime scene, which Broodthaers treated as a symbol of painting itself.

Broodthaers described the work—which is essentially a film about a book about a painting about a ship at sea—this way:

‘A book suggesting image as function. A book suggesting the text as function. More than a theory, the subject of this proposition reflects a simple image of the frustration that rules the social condition of today, for example this year. Perhaps I should add that le sujet brille [the subject shines].’”¹

—Cathleen Chaffee, PhD, chief curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery

¹Marcel Broodthaers, “A Voyage on the North Sea, Press Release,” January 28, 1974.

Oscar Murillo

surge (social cataracts), 2019

Oil stick on velvet and linen, grommets and stainless steel rail

102 3/4 x 114 5/8 inches (261 x 291 cm)

The rush of undulating blues convey a sense of motion and depth across the surface of the painting. Referencing both the surge of energy used to make the works, as well as water’s ability to flow indiscriminately without regard to maps or borders, Murillo conjures a utopian and cautionary vision of contemporary geopolitics.

Oscar Murillo, surge (social cataracts), 2019 (detail)

Oscar Murillo, surge (social cataracts), 2019 (detail)

Cy Gavin

Untitled (Wave Painting), 2020

Acrylic, oil, and watercolor pencil on canvas

88 x 92 inches (223.5 x 233.7 cm)

“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently, we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the Cosmos is also within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”

—Carl Sagan’s introduction to his Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

“A line of kids each carrying a boat made out of a shoe leaves Europe in the direction of Morocco, while a second line of kids with shoe-boats leaves Africa in the direction of Spain. The two lines will meet on the horizon.”

—Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs

Una historia de desencuentro, Gibraltar, 2008-2020

Oil on canvas on board

7 7/8 x 10 1/4 inches (20 x 26 cm)

Not Vital

Seascape, 2013

Marble and plaster

36 5/8 x 62 1/4 x 7 1/8 inches (93 x 158 x 18 cm)

Seascape is a sculpture made using Dali stone sourced from Yunnan province in Southwest China. The artist was inspired by this regional marble, renowned for its natural variations in cloudy hues of black and white that suggest ethereal landscapes and, in this case, seascapes. The sculptural relief juts out from the wall at an irregular angle, warping the perspective of a traditional container or frame.

Max Beckman

Badansicht bei Bandol, 1938

Oil on canvas

27 5/8 x 35 3/8 inches (70.2 x 89.9 cm)

The present work is a component of In Search of the Miraculous (1975), an unfinished three-part performance, of which the second part was a three-month journey Bas Jan Ader attempted from Chatham, Massachusetts, to Falmouth, England, alone in a twelve-and-a-half-foot sailboat named Ocean Wave, the smallest boat to attempt to cross the Atlantic. Ten months later, remnants of Ader’s boat were found drifting in the ocean off the coast of Ireland.

Bas Jan Ader

Bulletin 89: In Search of the Miraculous (Songs for the North Atlantic), July 1975

Offset-printed, black and white, 4 pp.

11 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches (29.1 x 22.2 cm)

Edition of 800

“In the tradition of vision quests, this passage was his own epic poem where the artist serves as the central heroic figure. In this work, Ader pits himself against the elements, a proposition in which the reconciliation of existential truths, and queries of fate and faith likely played a major role.”

—Pilar Tompkins Rivas, Bas Jan Ader: Suspended Between Laughter and Tears

Bas Jan Ader, Bulletin 89: In Search of the Miraculous (Songs for the North Atlantic), 1975 (detail)

Bas Jan Ader, Bulletin 89: In Search of the Miraculous (Songs for the North Atlantic), 1975 (detail)

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