Earthed Lightning: Northern Landscapes by Frank Webster

Isabel Sullivan Gallery is pleased to present, Earthed Lightning: Northern Landscapes by Frank Webster, on view from May 8 through June 15, 2024. The exhibition marks the first occasion where a careful selection of Webster’s paintings and works on paper featuring diverse environs of the North will be displayed together. Forming a topographical and temporal symphony, the exhibition will explore Webster’s travels and artist residencies in the West of Ireland, on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and in Iceland. An opening reception with the artist will be held on May 8, from 6-8 pm, at 39 Lispenard Street.

In its title, the exhibition references an evocative phrase from Seamus Heaney’s poem Postscript, in which he reflected on an afternoon trip down the West Coast of Ireland describing the nature he bore witness to as a “glorious exultation of air and sea and swans.” Webster’s work gives painterly expression to the exalting qualities of nature, and through their color and line, introduce sentiments of spiritual gravitas, bewilderment and pathos. To stand before them is to be engulfed in a sensory experience that illuminates the vastness of time, its preciousness and the precarity of our place within.

The land and seascapes in the exhibition bear nearly inconceivable continuums. As the years turned over, there the glaciers, stone and volcanic rock stood – collecting, witnessing and absorbing centuries of winds, storms and seasons. Their formation and formations quite literally attest to temporality and continuous states of transformation and alchemic processes. Stone and ice become keepers of memory, and their surfaces turn into images bearing the markings of time.

Webster’s painterly transcription and transmutation of his experiences in these spaces bring us into contact with some of the most ethereal pockets on the planet. Painting natural phenomena such as remnants of flowing lava, the crags, crevices and cracks in limestone, the jagged ridges and outlines of glaciers, or piercing, unbridled mountains – Webster reminds us that the earth’s materiality, ornaments and physical assertions are more fantastical and surreal than anything the human mind could conceive of.

Earthed Lighting is ubiquitous in Webster’s landscapes – it bursts, erupts and emerges from beneath to render us stupefied by its grandeur, potency and mystical rhythms. A true redeemer of Schelling’s 19th Century Naturphilosophie, the Hudson River School and the plein-air process, Webster’s paintings are profound and essential. They imprint on the viewers' consciousness, and propel us towards an awakening, and a recognition of the enduring truth that we are all rooted in the soil.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Isabel Sullivan Gallery, 39 Lispenard Street, New York, United States