Winter Street Gallery is pleased to present Sea Show, an exhibition featuring 25 artists addressing themes around the ocean. For centuries a fertile source of inspiration to artists, the sea and its environs are newly animated in fresh and unexpected ways by the artworks presented. On view from July 30 to August 28, the exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by Reilly Davidson, an excerpt of which follows below:

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Artists have wrestled with seascapes since antiquity, though there was a notable uptick in popularity during the Dutch Golden Age. Painters of this era sought to announce the region’s newfound trading powers alongside exploring the subject’s technical potential. Depictions of the sea subsequently came to represent the beauty of nature, time, tranquility, freedom, narrative accounts, and the like. However, as styles shift, so does the subject. The genre has waxed and waned avant-garde sentiment in more recent years, as its history has been challenged by abstract and conceptual artists alike. 

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Sea Show presents a myriad of image-makers assembled in order to reconcile the past, present, and future of maritime painting. Here, disparate parts combine to create a succinct vision of the seascape. 

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The considerable range of artists on view have been called upon to uphold the seascape genre’s durability and favorable prospects. Collisions between mediums and ranging interests elicit new patterns of dialogue between multigenerational image-makers. A firm mutualism is established by way of context, as Martha’s Vineyard provides a chance interaction between these works and a real coastal topography.