Sea View

About the Gallery
Sea View is a Los Angeles-based contemporary art gallery dedicated to the discovery and advocacy of emerging and overlooked voices. Housed within a carefully restored 1935 "Old Hollywood" building, the gallery presents four exhibition areas and a pied-à-terre that supports its artist-first approach in fostering intersectional dialogues between art, design, and architecture.

Founded in 2022 by Sara Lee Hantman, Sea View opened in a domestic concept space designed by Jorge Pardo for MOCA on Sea View Lane in Mount Washington. Part studio and part exhibition site, Pardo described it as a “social sculpture,” rejecting traditional systems of categorization and exhibition. Sea View is led by a desire to test intimate, historical contexts for artists and viewers alike, now situated in Hollywood's commercial gallery district.

About the Presentation
Sea View will present work by William Wright in a solo presentation, marking Wright’s New York debut. In contrast to the speed of contemporary image making and consumption, Wright’s work stems from a slower process of routine, endurance, and revision. A nod to 18th Century Vanitas painting, Wright’s paintings reflect the carefully studied corners of his workspace and home populated by fruit, wilted flowers, open windows, and watches – apt symbols that speak to necessity, the passage of time, and the quiet revelations that come with persistency and ritual in the artist’s studio. Rendered in bottomless planes of velvet color that are sanded down and built up over multiple layers of oil and acrylic, Wright’s subjects boldly resist illusion with textured contours that underscore a certain playfulness and magic in the otherwise quotidian and domestic. A skull or timepiece may appear as an emblem within a contemporary memento mori, a meditation on the fragility of life that reminds us to live with greater intention. In Wright’s hands, these motifs become markers of self-discipline, of the gritty, monotonous humanity and dark humor embedded in the act of making. Rooted in a painter’s lineage, from Philip Guston to Giorgio Morandi and James Castle, Wright’s paintings evolve over many weeks and months of creating, effacing and transforming the everyday into an enduring study of time and meaning.