Julia Felsenthal

JDJ is thrilled to present Julia Felsenthal’s debut solo exhibition in New York at JDJ Tribeca.

Felsenthal’s intimately-scaled watercolor paintings evoke the quiet profundity of the ocean as witnessed from the beaches near her studio on Cape Cod. Informed by her keen skills of reportage—honed during the artist’s decade and a half working as an arts and culture journalist—each painting offers a distinct, devotional meditation on the meeting of sky and sea, and on the varied color and texture effects created by the Cape’s ever-shifting atmospheric conditions.

At once rigidly simple in their compositional constraints and obsessively dense in their mark-making, Felsenthal’s paintings toe a central fault-line: they celebrate and chronicle the protean nature of water and air while indulging and interrogating the all-too-human desire to halt time, to screenshot a view, or to crystallize the fleeting emotions we experience while viewing it.

About this new series of paintings, Felsenthal writes:

In my experience interviewing painters, I have always been interested in the way they talk about the impulse to make images, the need to flatten, to recreate, to encapsulate, to distill. My paintings are as much about that compulsion to paint as they are about the sea itself: about my own need to compress something vast down to a miniature scale, to bottle it up and share it, a portal to a place and a feeling.

The term Thalassomania—its root from Thalassa, Greek goddess and embodiment of the sea—refers to an abnormal love of the ocean, identifying something aberrant in the natural tendency to gravitate toward water, especially during times of emotional tumult.