By Sholto Blissett
July 2025
On the occasion of his exhibition The white heat of cold water, the artist Sholto Blissett writes about the concepts he explores in his new body of work.
Sholto Blissett
The white heat of cold water, maelstrom, 2025
oil on canvas
63 x 78 3/4 in. (160 x 200 cm.)
These works display the erosion of land by water, both ice and liquid water, highlighting the importance of water in sculpting landscapes. In the works, as in the world, water is not a passive component of the landscape but rather the active architect of a landscape.
iPhone image by Sholto Blissett, New Zealand, 2025.
We are alienated from much of the life of water. So often when we encounter water it has been contained, sterilised and nullified for our use, to give us life. This is an incredible achievement that serves humans incredibly well. But because of this we have forgotten that water is elemental. It has multitudes and it supports multitudes of life. It flows through the gills of a trout and is drawn up as sap into the leaves of a tree. Water is something we encounter, not just something we use. It has a life of its own, torrents carve and mould land, erode and deposit as they feel their way to the sea.
Installation view of Sholto Blissett: The white heat of cold water (September 10-October 15, 2025) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
Much of the scenes depicted are the product of cold water’s white heat, its animating force; the deep u-shaped valleys, the sculpted cave mouths, the open plains, the cavernous gorges and rock arches. Not to mention the plants that grow rampant, dependent on water and carry rivers of sap within them. Water is the driving force, it is almost sacral in the works as it is sacral in so many world religions (Christianity and Hinduism to name two notable examples) and other belief systems including the secular nature worship of the environmental movement.
iPhone image by Sholto Blissett, New Zealand, 2025.
‘White heat’ refers to both the strange almost burning sensation you feel when you swim in cold water and the blinding brightness of clear, fast flowing water or ice when illuminated by sunlight. It also hints at its erosive industriousness, ‘white heat’ being a phrase synonymous with action, dynamism, and technology.
Sholto Blissett
The white heat of cold water, vortex, 2025
oil on canvas
78 3/4 x 63 in. (200 x 160 cm.)
The oxymoron in the title of ‘heat’ and ‘cold’ echoes the contradictory nature of water, at once life giving and constructive and also erosive and destructive. Water can be soft, supportive and malleable, taking any shape, but also powerful, inhospitable and deadly. It has no singular essence, it can never be reduced to one thing.
iPhone image by Sholto Blissett, New Zealand, 2025.
But despite water’s variety in form and behaviour we have sought to erase it where it behaves as anything other than a recourse for our use. The 1865 Viele Map of Manhattan island displays the modern grid format of the city in an ethereal grey layered over a map of Manhattan’s pre-urban geography. Here rivers flow in number through forest, grassland, and marshland in what is now a concrete jungle. One river flowed west from its source in what is now central park right under the gallery and out into the Hudson, gathering the water of other tributary streams through its course.
In such densely populated urban areas it is often hard to imagine the land before a city occupied the space, we tend to take things as we find them, living as though a city like New York is a given and not an anomaly on what was previously a more sparsely populated landscape of forest and streams. We often forget that New York is a city that arose precisely because of its location at the mouth of the Hudson, like many great cities around the world and through time, it is born from a river.
Sholto Blissett
The white heat of cold water, silvered, 2025
oil on canvas
78 3/4 x 63 in. (200 x 160 cm.)
Sholto Blissett (b. 1996, Salisbury, UK) received an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London and a BA in Geography from Durham University in Durham, England. The artist’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK; Colnaghi, London, UK; Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, UK; Peres Projects, Milan, IT and Berlin, GE; Nassima Landau Art Foundation, Tel Aviv; Mattia di Luca Gallery, Rome, IT; The Artist Room, London, UK; White Cube, London, UK; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; and L.U.P.O., Milan, IT among others. Blissett lives and works in London, UK.
This exhibition follows the artist’s solo show at the gallery Sholto Blissett: Rubicon (January 25-February 22, 2023), his inclusion in the Dallas Art Fair (April 4-7, 2024), and in the gallery’s group shows The Natural World: Part II (March 9-April 13, 2022) and Sholto Blissett, Emma Fineman, Madeline Peckenpaugh (December 10, 2021-January 22, 2022). Alexander Berggruen, New York and Pilar Corrias, London co-represent the artist.
Sholto Blissett: The white heat of cold water will run at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3) from September 10-October 15, 2025.
iPhone image by Sholto Blissett, New Zealand, 2025.
Installation view of Sholto Blissett: The white heat of cold water (September 10-October 15, 2025) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
