Every Mountain is an Ocean

OCHI is pleased to present _Every Mountain Is an Ocean_, an exhibition of nine paintings by New York-based artist Matthew F Fisher. This is the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery. _Every Mountain Is an Ocean_ will be on view November 21, 2026 through January 2, 2027 at OCHI, located at 605 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 21 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM PST. For more than a decade, Fisher's subject was the sea. Waves, shells, and the long horizontal line where water meets sky. Where the sea changes by the minute, a mountain is rock pushed skyward over spans of time no person witnesses or perceives. Fisher's peaks are invented in the studio. He does not know his final destination when he starts, and the mountains are not painted from life. The mountain as built form rather than observed place has a modernist lineage that runs through Marsden Hartley, who painted the mountains of Maine from memory while living in France, and later pared Mount Katahdin down to its elemental profile. Fisher's signature pristine surface runs through every canvas, and up close it holds two speeds of making. Skies fade through smooth, even gradients, the clear shade of a bluebird day. Against them sit passages built from small, obsessively repeated marks, and snow drawn in a contoured line over flat color. The clouds arrive in scalloped bands that float over the mountains and hold each scene in a single instant. The viewer is caught suspended above each peak rising out of the clouds. Fisher describes the position as "getting my feet off the ground, my head in the sky." Seen from that height, a mountain loosens into shape, and landscape becomes what it has long been for Fisher, a way into abstraction. In the mountains, our sense of time, of scale, and of our own bodies in the world shifts all at once. That shift is what Fisher means when he says, "this is our house, and it's not our house at all." _Every Mountain Is an Ocean_ is an homage to that sense of awe, the moment when not knowing outweighs understanding.