Carolina Nitsch is pleased announce the gallery's fitst exhibition with NY to based artist Alexis Rockman, entitled Bioluminescence, featuring a series of twenty recent works on paper.

This project visualizes deep sea creatures and also imagines their interactions within the ocean's ecosystem. Painted with gouache on black paper, these works developed out of Rockman's visual concept art for the film "Life of Pi", which has been featured at the Drawing Center in New York and the New Orleans Museum of Art. They relate stylistically and technically to his field drawings and watercolors, which are extremely fluid and appear to have been painted quickly like calligraphy, yet stand alone as highly substantial in their own right. While the field drawings often incorporate soil and other found materials, the Bioluminescence series captures the light and color as it stands out against the black paper, which acts as an alternate for the ocean depths.

The Bioluminescence drawings appear to capture real time observation and differ from his large scale oil paintings that are painstakingly created with lush detail which are more akin to Hieronymus Bosch or Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Rockman was raised in Manhattan and haunted the American Museum of Natural History. The museum's theatrical dioramas and dark passages are an obvious influence on Alexi's work which manages to strike a fine balance between natural history and conceptual art.

Rockman's oeuvre is at once sincere and perverse, thoughtful and grotesque. As the artist has said, "My drawings are the antithesis of my paintings because they are so immediate, they bloom and create themselves. They function like pictograms, fossils, or shadows".

Alexis Rockman was born in 1962 in New York City, where he studied at the Art Students League from 197879. He also studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, from 198082 and the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he received his BFA in 1985. Rockman has exhibited extensively worldwide since 1985. He has been featured in a number of solo museum exhibitions including: East End Field Drawings at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY, 2015; Manifest Destiny at the Brooklyn Museum, NY (2005, traveling to the Rhode Island School of Design, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, and Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO); and Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2010, traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH); Dioramas at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (1996); Alexis Rockman: A Recent History of the World at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (1999).His work is represented in public and private collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Fully illustrated exhibition catalog published by Carolina Nitsch available

For more information or images please contact the gallery at 212-645-2030 or email: [email protected]