Sarah Schlesinger’s Seascapes Refuse to Show You Everything
New York–based painter Sarah Schlesinger has never shown an interest in revealing the full picture. In « Sight Line, » her second solo exhibition with Huxley-Parlour, at the gallery’s Swallow Street location in London, she continues to obfuscate masterfully, through 12 new works on panel that engage with the seascape not as a vista, but a surface to be interrogated. And the tight, almost tyrannical cropping of the water’s surface and glimpses of sky convey as much as they withhold.
A practice built on withholding
First trained at Taylor University, Indiana, and later receiving her MFA at the New York Academy of Art, Schlesinger has spent much of her practice dismantling, examining, and reinterpreting landscape painting itself. While traditional landscapes or seascapes rely on the horizon line to orient the viewer, Schlesinger eschews the formal element entirely. Instead, subtle bands of murky color emerge across surfaces that only obliquely allude to their greater surroundings — a glowing orange light cascading over wave breaks, alluding to a rising or setting sun out of frame; the bilateral juxtaposition of murky green and dusty indigo, suggesting a cast shadow. One could be forgiven for mistaking these dimly lit compositions for total abstraction at first glance, as only upon closer inspection does it become apparent that these are, in fact, bodies of water.
Ambiguity as a state of focus
Never revealing the light source or offering a geographic clue by way of a shoreline, the ambiguity of place and time is at once unsettling and comfortingly decisive, keeping the viewer in a state of hyper-focus. These omissions also contribute to the psychological undercurrents of Schlesinger’s depictions of water, underscoring that her study is as much of light as of the seascape or landscape genre. Optically wavering between representation and abstraction, each canvas resists easy surface and subject designations.
A subjective vision
Emphasized by the show’s title, what these dozen paintings together posit is that vision and visual understanding are ultimately subjective, and perhaps even wholly unable to be codified. Through exceptionally tight cropping, meticulous attention to the physicality of water, and the restrained use of color, Schlesinger renders scenes that resist a single, stable reading. Instead, she asks viewers to project their own sense of time, place, and scale onto what is, ultimately, an arrangement of paint.
« Sarah Schlesinger: Sight Line » is on view at Huxley-Parlour, 3-5 Swallow Street, London, through October 17, 2026.