“Shifted Horizon” Exhibition

Hesse Flatow

[Image: Aglaé Bassens "Palm Reflections" 2021. Oil paint on canvas, 54 x 40 in.]

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HESSE FLATOW presents a group exhibition of contemporary landscape painting, featuring work by 8 artists. Shifted Horizon consists of natural and built horizons which range in medium and interpretation, collectively disrupting the cliché notion of the formal genre of landscape painting. The once steady horizon line has tilted and uncovered new perspectives as the pandemic has been a catalyst for these artist’s shifted viewpoints after a year of solitude, isolation, and longing. This group of artists propose different ways of looking; slower, closer, outward, and above all, introspectively.

Aglaé Bassens’ palm trees and Amanda Baldwin’s bright foliage transport the viewer to distant locales which allude to escape but manage to keep our gazes turned inwards. Abstraction is explored in the observational garden paintings of Lumin Wakoa and the explosive gradients of Natalie Birinyi’s work, inviting us to look closely at crevices and elusive edges of a digital landscape. The wide views of Alan Prazniak and James Morse’s expressive gestures ponder our greater relationship to nature. The close up, enclosed gardens of Sarah Schlesinger and Sung Hwa Kim’s solitary night scenes point to beacons of hidden light and play under the cover of darkness.

With the rapidly changing world around us, these artists provide revived examinations of our surroundings while contemplating a newfound, heightened awareness of self, being and co-existence with the environment. Heralding from locales as diverse as Belgium, Seattle, Washington, Pennsylvania and South Korea, they find commonalities in their perceived horizons and the conversations engendered between them.