Sea of Ice: Echoes of the European Romantic Era

This exhibition centers on the SBMA’s James Casebere photograph, Sea of Ice (2014). Casebere based his work on German artist Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774–1840) painting of the same name from 1823–24, famous since its debut for its riveting vision of an Arctic naval disaster.

Reacting against the 18th century’s championing of science and reason, early 19th-century Romantic writers and artists sought to capture the intensity and worth of individual experience, often with grand depictions of awe-inspiring nature. Today, we encounter a similar predicament the Romantics faced: in our age of climate change and technological development, how do we represent nature and our precarious relationship to it?

Sea of Ice includes a variety of paintings, photographs, prints and drawings from the collection from the 19th to the 21st century, and an important video loan by Austrian artist Lukas Marxt (b. 1983), all of which reflect Romanticism’s revolutionary and lasting importance.