The Quiet Expanse

Group Exhibition: Kees Van Dongen, Mary Sipp Green, Zvonimir Mihanovic and George Nemethy

Findlay Galleries New York is pleased to present The Quiet Expanse, a group exhibition spanning Modern to Contemporary, bringing together four artists united by their devotion to water, horizon, light, and atmosphere. Seascape, here, is less a place than a state of mind.

Water is the leitmotif connecting the paintings from Van Dongen’s early 20^th century depiction of French Riviera to Sipp Green’s recent luminous interpretation of a sunset on Long Island’s East End.  Water, in these paintings, is never only a subject. It is a surface for light, a passage toward distance, a stillness so complete one can almost hear it: the low hush of tide against hull, or nothing at all.

Van Dongen opens the exhibition in 1920s elegance, rendering the French Riviera in washes of blue intersected by the jaunty diagonals of the sails and masts of passing marine vessels.  Mihanović slows the tempo holding harbors, boats, and shorelines in luminous, near-perfect calm. Nemethy compresses. His intimate marine paintings are jewel-like, vastness reduced to a scale that rewards close, private study, intimacy standing in for immensity. And furthest from shore, Sipp Green lets the coastline go, her blues loosening into abstraction, memory, and feeling, until landscape becomes atmosphere and atmosphere becomes almost nothing at all.

Together, these four artists, working across nearly a century, sustain a dialogue between precision and softness, intimacy and expanse, recognition and reverie. The Quiet Expanse is less an exhibition of seascapes than a meditation on painting’s capacity to hold space: to make of the horizon not a boundary, but a doorway, close enough to touch, into that quiet state of mind where land ends and something else, harder to name, begins.