Opening Reception Friday, May 8th, 6-8pm
"Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion"
— Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination
DIMIN is pleased to present Half in Love with Oblivion, an exhibition of new paintings by British-born, California-based artist Stephen Thorpe. Marking a significant development in the artist’s practice following his relocation to the Mojave Desert, this body of work expands upon the psychological concerns of his earlier interiors, opening them outward into vast, symbolic landscapes that are at once external and deeply interior. Half in Love with Oblivion reflects on a fundamental human impulse—the simultaneous attraction to and fear of dissolution. The title, drawn from Macfarlane’s meditation on the magnetic pull of mountains, speaks to this paradox: the desire to lose oneself in something vast and unknowable, even as one remains tethered to the self. Thorpe’s paintings inhabit this threshold, offering spaces in which viewers might confront the limits of perception, identity, and understanding.
Thorpe’s previous exhibition, Dream House, drew upon psychoanalytic frameworks which explore the architecture of the psyche through the motif of the domestic interior. Rooms and corners functioned as sites of containment and introspection, mapping the layered structure of consciousness and the unconscious. In Half in Love with Oblivion, these enclosed spaces give way to a more primal form of interiority: the cave. No longer bound by constructed walls, Thorpe’s spaces are now hewn from the earth itself—ancient, geological, and expressing a deeper temporal resonance. This shift is both geographic and conceptual. The Mojave Desert, with its vast expanses and stark topographies, has triggered a reorientation in Thorpe’s work, moving away from the psychological interior as a constructed space toward the landscape as a psychological condition. The desert becomes not merely a setting, but a field of perception—an arena in which the boundaries between inner and outer experience dissolve.
Mountains, long present in Thorpe’s paintings as secondary or framed elements, now assume a central and archetypal role. Emerging through apertures, thresholds, and cavernous openings, they function as symbols of transcendence, endurance, and transformation. Across cultures and histories, mountains have been revered as sites of spiritual ascent and revelation—from sacred cosmologies to the solitary quests of mystics and pilgrims. In Thorpe’s work, they operate as archetypes: primordial images that structure human experience and recur across time and place. These landscapes are not naturalistic depictions, but what might be described as psychological landscapes—spaces shaped as much by memory, myth, and internal states as by observation. In the piece Descent as Illumination, a cavernous vista opens onto distant, luminous peaks, positioning the viewer within a liminal space: suspended between enclosure and expanse, darkness and illumination, the known and the unknowable. Pathways wind forward into the distance, suggesting both a physical journey and a metaphysical passage—a movement toward dissolution, or perhaps renewal.
Thorpe’s engagement with cultural and historical references continues to underpin the work. Echoes of Romantic landscape painting, Symbolism, and Eastern philosophical traditions intersect with motifs drawn from mythology and sacred architecture. The cave carries a particularly layered significance, as a site of origin and refuge, of ritual and revelation, from prehistoric dwellings to Plato’s allegory, and onward through religious and esoteric traditions. In this context, Thorpe’s paintings propose a connection between ancient modes of understanding and contemporary psychological inquiry. Half in Love with Oblivion reflects on a fundamental human impulse—the simultaneous attraction to and fear of dissolution. Visually the painting contrasts the handling of the cave and the distant mountains through shifts in surface and atmosphere. The cave is rendered with smooth, controlled passages of blue, where subtle tonal transitions follow the undulating contours of the rock, giving the space a tactile, enveloping presence. In contrast, the mountains are simplified into soft, luminous layers of yellow and orange that dissolve gradually into the distance, creating a more atmospheric and immaterial sense of depth. This interplay mirrors the conceptual dualities at play: interior and exterior, permanence and ephemerality, persistence and transformation.
Born in Margate, England and raised in Aberdeen, Scotland, Stephen Thorpe studied painting at the Royal College of Art in London and was a Professor of Painting at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Hong Kong and Atlanta, GA before relocating to New York and then California. Thorpe’s recent solo exhibitions include The Last Word Always Belongs to the Mountain at Ora Ora in Hong Kong (2025); and Dream House at DIMIN in New York (2024) which was named a “Must-See” by Artsy and Art Net. Thorpe has participated in group exhibitions and art fairs around the world at venues including Aicon Gallery, New York; Saatchi Gallery, London; the National Museum, Gdansk, Poland; the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; Art Basel Hong Kong, NADA New York, and Untitled Miami Beach. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Art Newspaper, Widewalls, Art Net News, Artnews, Hyperallergic, Surface Magazine, and Lifestyle Asia, among others.
