Alexis Rockman: Feedback Loop

Press Release

Alexis Rockman
Feedback Loop
513 West 20th Street, New York, NY
January 15 – February 28, 2026

Opening reception Thursday, January 15 from 6–8PM


PRESS

Colossal


Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Feedback Loop, an exhibition of new and recent work by Alexis Rockman marking his first solo presentation with the gallery. Titled after the scientific phenomenon in which ecological disruption amplifies itself over time, the exhibition highlights humanity’s fragile relationship to the natural world, crystallizing Rockman’s long-standing ecological concerns at a moment when climate anxiety has become both scientifically undeniable and culturally pervasive.

Bringing together new Forest Fire paintings, a suite of related watercolors, Rockman’s iconic Forest Floor (1990), and Pioneers (2017) from his celebrated Great Lakes Cycle, Feedback Loop demonstrates the artist’s continued and consistently prescient engagement with the accelerating urgency of environmental destruction. Anchored by new paintings and works on paper in dialogue with two of Rockman’s now-classic works, the exhibition traces an arc that spans nearly five decades of practice — one that mirrors the evolving cultural understanding of environmental consciousness itself.

Rockman’s vision first took shape in the mid-1980s, when ecological awareness was shifting from activism to a more rigorous scientific reckoning. Absorbing early warnings about global warming, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion, he developed a distinctive synthesis of empirical research, environmental history, and speculative imagination. These influences are evident in Forest Floor, first exhibited in his landmark 1990 show at Jay Gorney Modern Art in New York City. Inspired by the beloved, larger-than-life diorama at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, the painting announced Rockman’s commitment to the densely layered ecosystems that sustain life by presenting the forest floor not as backdrop, but as an intricately interdependent world unto itself. Held privately by the artist for more than three decades and never previously available, its inclusion here is both historically significant and profoundly resonant.

The new Forest Fire paintings extend this early inquiry into a starker, more urgent register. As wildfires grow more frequent and destructive worldwide, driven by climate change and cascading ecological feedback, Rockman captures both their devastation and the eerie, catastrophic luminosity of landscapes overtaken by flame. These painterly and alchemical works serve as powerful contemporary counterpoints to the ecological intricacies of Forest Floor, underscoring the increasingly unstable systems that once sustained its delicately balanced world.

In dialogue with these works, Pioneers (2017), a panoramic painting, continues Rockman’s exploration of environmental histories through cinematic scale. Depicting species that first entered the Great Lakes at the end of the last ice age alongside the more recent ecological disruption brought by human activity, such as ballast water introduced through the Erie Canal, Pioneers extends the epic-format tradition seen in his earlier Evolution (1992) and Manifest Destiny (1999-2004). With sweeping compositional reach and encyclopedic attention to the intertwined histories of species, land, and water, the image deepens Rockman’s commitment to rendering the temporal and ecological complexities of the natural world.

Presented alongside Pioneers are examples of Rockman’s Great Lakes Field Drawings — small works on paper executed in a watercolor idiom using soils, sediments, and organic matter gathered from sites around the Great Lakes. Their material immediacy and grounding in discrete environmental locations, such as Pictured Rocks National Park and the Toronto Power Plant, offer an intimate counterpoint to the panoramic scale of the painting, further binding the expansive and the personal in a poignant dialogue.

The exhibition additionally features a new group of watercolors created specifically for Feedback Loop. Engaging with his art-historical predecessors, such as Martin Johnson Heade, Frederic Edwin Church, and Winslow Homer, Rockman extends his long-standing exploration of beauty, fragility, and transformation in the natural world. These works reflect his enduring belief in the necessity of both cherishing and defending the environments that will shape our shared future.

About Alexis Rockman

Alexis Rockman (b.1962, New York, NY) is an artist and environmental activist who began making paintings and works on paper to build environmental awareness in the mid-1980s.  Embarking on expeditions to distant locations like Antarctica and Madagascar in the company of professional naturalists, his work tells stories of natural histories confronting the challenging future we face of the biodiversity crisis, global warming, and genetic engineering. 

Notable solo museum exhibitions include Alexis Rockman: Manifest Destiny at the Brooklyn Museum (2004), which traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts (2004) and the Rhode Island School of Design (2005). In 2010, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow, a major survey of his paintings and works on paper which toured to The Wexner Center for the Arts. In 2013, The Drawing Center mounted Drawings from Life of Pi, featuring the artist’s collaboration with Ang Lee on the award-winning film Life of Pi (2012). His series of seventy-six New Mexico field drawings was included in Future Shock at SITE Santa Fe (2017-18). Alexis Rockman: The Great Lakes Cycle, a major exhibition of large-scale paintings, watercolors and field drawings, toured the Midwest in 2018-20, opening at the Grand Rapids Art Museum and traveled to five other institutions in the Great Lakes region. Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks, opened at the Peabody Essex Museum (2021) and traveled to Guild Hall (2021), Ackland Art Museum (2022), and Princeton University Art Museum (2022). In May 2023, The Mystic Seaport Museum presented Alexis Rockman: Oceanus, featuring ten large-scale watercolors and an 8-by-24-foot panoramic painting commissioned by the museum for their permanent collection. Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: A Journey to Nature’s Underworld was presented at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT in the summer of 2023 and will travel to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, The Tang Teaching Museum and other institutions through 2025. 

Rockman’s work is represented in many museum collections, including the Baltimore Museum  of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Grand Rapids Art  Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, New Orleans  Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum,  Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art. He lives and works  in Warren, Connecticut.