Johnson Lowe Gallery Winter Exhibits (Thursdays)

From the venue:

Reliquary

Steven Seinberg
6 December 2024 - 25 January 2025

Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Reliquary, a solo exhibition of new works by Steven Seinberg. On view from December 6, 2024, through January 25, 2025, this exhibition marks Seinberg’s first presentation with Johnson Lowe Gallery and the 17th solo exhibition in the gallery’s 34-year history.

Reliquary furthers Seinberg’s long-standing exploration of absence, boundary, and form, presenting a series of mixed-media drawings, paintings, and sculptures that evoke the tension between concealment and revelation. Layered with oil, acrylic, charcoal, and graphite, Seinberg’s paintings hold a quiet luminosity, their textured surfaces suggesting a charged interplay of light and shadow. These works mark a significant evolution in Seinberg’s practice, as the forms within them—gestures, chromatic fields, and organic abstractions—appear to resist their containment, as if imbued with sentience. The sculptures, meanwhile, extend this inquiry into three dimensions, recalling reliquary-like vessels that hold not just objects but the memory and presence of the sacred.

Seinberg’s process builds surfaces that alternately accumulate and erode, as though each work is engaged in a search for its own concealed truths. The dynamic interplay of opacity and translucence echoes his earlier investigations into boundaries, but here, the materials seem charged with their own vitality, animated by the very limits that define them. In Reliquary, the forms do not merely occupy their spaces—they push against them, engaging in a dialogue with the confines of their canvas or sculptural enclosure, much like the sacred objects housed within traditional reliquaries.

This sense of sentience draws parallels to the reliquary’s dual function as both a container and a site of transformation. Seinberg’s compositions, layered and tactile, suggest repositories of memory, where the tension between preservation and dissolution reveals an essential interplay of materiality and impermanence. What is revealed, what remains hidden, and what escapes entirely becomes a central question of the work. His surfaces ripple with subtle textures of light and shadow, simultaneously veiling and exposing, creating an almost meditative space where substance and the ephemeral coexist.

Seinberg’s time in Portugal, where he has resided part-time since 2022, deeply informs the conceptual and formal language of this series. Encounters with sacred spaces—charged with devotional objects and atmospheres steeped in history—have amplified his exploration of memory as a material phenomenon. Like the reliquaries he studied, Seinberg’s works function as vessels that transcend their physicality, holding traces of transformation and becoming. Each piece teeters on the edge of dissolution yet remains resolutely present, embodying a luminous meditation on what it means to preserve, to release, and to inhabit the spaces in between.