Josie Morway
For Its Own Sake

August 8th - September 6th 2025

Opening night reception Friday, August 8th 6-9pm

Please contact us to get larger images , detail images, or a video walk around of a piece!

Gallery represented artist Josie Morway returns to the gallery with an astonishing new show of paintings. Her works depicts animals painted in a hyperrealistic style, set amongst Vanitas- like tableaus of comfort and sustenance, and juxtaposed with abstracted, dark backgrounds. They radiate an almost devotional serenity with the subjects brightly lit and rendered to the tiniest details, while the dark backgrounds softly glimmer behind.
While much of her work is a response to the environmental degradation of the Anthropocene, it also speaks joyously to the resilience of nature, and shares and expands on the love many people have for what humans once considered their close kin and spiritual companions. Through Josie’s work we’re made to look back to the wonderment of nature and our fellow beings, in an exhortation to protect and nurture, not destroy and pillage. We are excited to share this beautiful and deeply moving show.
Image: *To Clothe And Comfort* oil on canvas

My work has always been a defense of the natural world and an argument for attention – to detail and wonder, to fragility and fortitude, to natural systems and to our place within them – as well as a plea for conservation. In this historical moment, I can hardly be unique nor especially eloquent in expressing horror at the backsliding of environmental regulations and countless other policies in our country. Amidst it all, I’ve found myself particularly horrified by the rise of feudalistic technology companies and generative AI.

The proliferation of AI in the form of chat bots and image generators not only threatens our climate, water supply and energy system, but also poses an existential threat to the very project of art-making. We seem to be risking the livability of our planet as well as the passions and efforts that make the living itself feel meaningful. The plagiarism ensured by tech models consuming our work, the cognitive offloading that drains our creative capacities, the context collapse threatened by constant reproduction and simulation… after years of doubting whether painting was a meaningful answer to the needs of the world, it all leaves me feeling like the act of making art – with my own fallible hand and with an irrationally large investment of time – might, at last, actually be an act of resistance.

I’ve approached my latest paintings with work itself as their theme, and with the hope that continuing to make my work for its own sake will resonate as one small defense of the living, breathing world. The wildlife subjects of these paintings are playfully combined with symbols of our earthly efforts and endeavors, whether they’re matters of survival – pollination and germination or feeding one’s child in spite of it all – or the strange and wonderful efforts we’re capable of when we’re lucky enough to experiment above and beyond subsistence: feats of physical prowess and grace, poetry and music, intricate art and decoration, culinary adventure, cultural preservation and reimagination.

TLDR: I made these paintings because I could. - Josie Morway

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