THOMAS HOUSEAGO: NIGHT SEA JOURNEY

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Thomas Houseago: Night Sea Journey, a major exhibition that sees the artist pushing boundaries as he sprawls intricate visions across three floors of the gallery’s Beaux-Arts townhouse.

September 9 – October 19, 2024

Night Sea Journey marks Houseago’s first exhibition in New York City in ten years. It showcases new paintings and sculptures that realize the artist’s recent battles with trauma, from which he emerged with a greater understanding of his powers. The result is a raw odyssey from darkness to light that culminates in a symphonic room-spanning tapestry on the gallery’s skylit top floor, created en plein air in Malibu, like the rest of the exhibition.

The exhibition reveals the artist’s first body of sculptures since his breakdown in 2019—entities forged in wood, bronze, steel, and plaster, seemingly imbued with a ragged consciousness of their own. Despite a previous avowal that he could not “work small,” the sculptures in Night Sea Journey range in size and theme, from the Stygian to the quotidian.

Across his work, Houseago interweaves personal and cultural mythologies with natural elements and processes, transforming his chosen media through applications of intuition, energy, and labor. Here, new and recurring motifs from the artist’s practice—such as chimerical figures, owls, eggs, skulls—cohere in a transformative narrative of struggle, loss, and renewal.

“I love the look of the moon and the sun setting on the ocean. It’s been a lifesaver for me and has immense meaning,” Houseago said. “It’s the reminder that you are part of a greater, astral mechanism. The sun rises and the moon rises, and the moon is a reflection of the sun that accompanies us through the night… beyond that, everything is sound and light waves, energy.”

The exhibition’s extraordinary representation of Houseago’s path grants us access to an honest, vital reckoning with gravity and transcendence.