OPENING RECEPTION: 1st THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3rd | FROM 5-8pm

Sullivan Goss is excited to announce its first solo exhibition for NATALIE ARNODLI, Water & Light. The exhibition will consist of nine paintings in oil and gouache of sharks, jellyfish, icebergs, huge waves, and lightning strikes on the water. Currently a doctoral candidate in marine biology at Stanford University, Arnoldi brings an unusually strong biographical connection to her Romantic, tonalist images of oceanic life at the beginning of the third millennium. 

Intimations of a deep time perspective operate beneath the surface here. For example, her largest painting of a jellyfish faintly illuminated with other invertebrates in the dark expanse of the ocean tells the story of a life form that has survived for hundreds of millions of years. Viewers are also reminded of humanity’s relatively recent arrival on the evolutionary scene by the tell-tale silhouette of a hammerhead shark in one of the artist’s small gouache paintings. Rendered in jewel-toned blues, deep blacks, electric purples, and with sizzling highlights of white, Natalie Arnoldi’s paintings feel both contemporary and rooted in the aesthetics of the second half of the nineteenth century. Her themes come from present-day science, but her sense of beauty seems to have a much older lineage.

Citing an interest in the psychology of ambiguous representation, the artist’s soft edges, limited palette, and dreamy imagery have distinct analogs in the American Tonalist tradition that thrived between 1880 and 1920. The similarities end there. The invocation of the sublime – a feeling of awe or even terror at the immensity and power of nature in relation to human experience – is another nineteenth century concern, but no one could mistake these paintings for older works. They feel distinctly contemporary.

NATALIE ARNOLDI’s exhibition will be shown in tandem with a complimentary solo exhibition for JOSEPH GOLDYNE. Hovering between abstraction and masterful realism, both artists have created bodies of work that blur aesthetic categories while remaining conscientiously engaged with the Romantic landscape tradition in American art.