Thomas Houseago
“Night Sea Journey”
New York, 19 East 64th Street
“Thomas Houseago is one of our greatest living sculptors, with each work representing a bold new step for the medium,” founding partner Dominique Lévy says. “The fact that the art in this show was made during a period of recovery proves the depths of his talent because it happens to represent some of the finest he has ever made. As one of Thomas’s earliest supporters, I am honored to host his grand return.”
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. A forbidding, monumental minotaur in bronze greets visitors at the entrance, while, on the second floor, the artist acknowledges a turn to painting with three-dimensional still lifes that offer nothing more apparently threatening than a breakfast.
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.
Even the minotaur is revealed to have its own vulnerability. An emblem of metamorphosis, the minotaur represents the tensions shared by great sculpture and human experience—between instinct and reason, beast and man, beauty and perversion. Released from its labyrinth, Houseago’s bronze is a manifestation of the artist’s own spiritual and creative transmutation. It stands amidst a series of large-scale redwood sculptures, including a totemic owl and consuming figures, that conjure evocations to an unknown forest against an umbral tapestry that portrays a moonlit abstract landscape, tracing the artist’s lifelong path from his birthplace of Leeds to his present home in California.
