ALEXIS ROCKMAN: VERTIGO

MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is very pleased to start 2026 with Vertigo, a solo presentation by American painter Alexis Rockman.

January 6 - 17, 2026

The Oxford Dictionary defines vertigo as “a sensation of whirling and loss of balance, associated particularly with looking down from a great height.”

Recently affected by bouts of vertigo himself, Rockman channels the physical and perceptual disorientation of his symptoms into a visionary pictorial register. Light fractures through overlapping leaves, butterflies appear suspended like distant constellations, and petals rise overhead in monumental scale.

The familiar lexicon of natural history painting—long central to Rockman’s practice—slips here into a cosmic, dreamlike terrain, where empirical observation gives way to embodied sensation.

Addressing the canon of landscape painting from this uniquely vulnerable position, Rockman not only inverts conventional modes of representation, but also proposes an interval of escape: a suspended point of view that functions like an open parenthesis within daily life, offering the viewer the serene vastness of open sky, momentarily freed from terrestrial instability.