Tyler Ormsby, Balloon, House of Seiko
Tyler Ormsby, Belly, 2025
By Annie Dauber
Tyler Ormsby’s Balloon effortlessly floats. The exhibition at House of Seiko’s new Los Angeles location is intimate and light. In this presentation of new oil paintings and light sculptures, Ormsby effortlessly intertwines levity and weight, materiality and abstraction, and motion and meditative stillness.
Walking into the space on a rare rainy night in LA, the quiet levity of the work glimmers through ambient conversation. The bright white light of the gallery walls illuminates the damp shadow of Daylight Saving’s early dark. The light from Ormsby’s constructed lamps bounces off the wall in yellow halos. The paintings are, at first glance, sweet, textured, and beckoning.
The exhibition is an exploration of levity and weightlessness, inspired by witnessing a gathering of hot air balloons over the Nevada desert. There is a lightness, both in palette and in the floating figures, that is deftly captured in these works. Winged and bouncing figures are caught in a state of upward motion, harkening to the skybound balloon’s levitational path. The paintings depict ascension without descension, an implied only-up-ness.
Tyler Ormsby, Pollen Kid, 2025
Ormsby referenced photos of his nieces, with their winged costumes and whimsical contraptions, as a basis for the figures in the work. He abstracts heavily from there, resulting in floating figures embedded in soft fields of color. While the characters are nearly featureless, the bright-eyed glimmer of childhood emerges from these figures, in their butterfly wings, in their smallness against swaths of color, in the rounded simplicity of the form.
Ormsby’s primitive markmaking and distilled abstraction emerge from a highly textured surface, dappled and dimpled with layered oil paint. The straightforward imagery and humble materials feel almost like cave paintings. The figures in each larger work are reminiscent of Degas’ dancers, merged with abstract figuration akin to that of Susan Rothenberg.
Left: Tyler Ormsby, Crushing Leaves, 2025; Right: Tyler Ormsby, Pink, 2025
In certain compositions, charcoal outlines remain intact on the canvas; in others, they are erased from view. The sketches, when they linger in the final work, are a reminder of the artist’s hand. In contrast with the comparative permanence and weight of the oil paint, the charcoal carries an element of temporality and weightlessness. The smudgy borders, in Reaching for Gourd, for instance, give a sense that the material, as well as the figure itself, could fly away.
Tyler Ormsby, Reaching With Gourd, 2025
In these single-figured works, Ormsby steers away from portraiture and into semi-abstraction. His paintings do not aim to communicate information about the individual, but rather distill a certain essence of humanity. The youth, play, and tenderness in these works circumvent the impulse to criticize or inspect, and instead speak directly to the heart.
Ormsby presents two new light sculptures in the exhibition. Each is constructed from found and foraged materials. Balloonish, hollowed gourds hover above large rocks, suspended in the air by copper tubing. They emit quiet light as the opaque gourd diverts the glow away from the viewer and toward the wall. Oxidation at the base of the sculpture shows the artist’s hand, evidence of the physical work of connecting the copper and rock. The sculptures are both tethered to earth and blithely afloat, materially heavy and visually light.
Tyler Ormsby, Balloon, 2025
In the sculptural works, the “string” of the balloon is visible, with a thin copper pipe serving as a tether. These hard, earthy materials are grounding; the rich pumice texture and matte surface of the dried gourd seem inseparable from gravitational bonds. At the same time, they defy the earthen tie, and seem to float against their weight.
The gourd appears both as material in the sculptures and as subject in the paintings. Ormsby uses this as a dichotomous tool. On one hand, there is an innate groundedness in the vegetable form: it grows from soil, it humbly feeds, earthly borne and bound. On the other hand, in the light sculptures and paintings such as Boy with Gourd, the round form looks like a balloon. At first glance, without a horizon line to reference, the gourd-balloon seems to carry the figure skyward. However, the title reorients the image, and tells us that what seems ethereal is actually firmly grounded. This representational opposition epitomizes the exhibition, where earth and ether are one, intertwined.
Tyler Ormsby, Boy with Gourd, 2025
Overall, Ormsby’s work is a whispered conversation between color and shape that we are lucky to listen in on. The implicit motion of his work carries the spirit upward: floating, bouncing, reaching.
The exhibition is on view at House of Seiko @ 4850 Santa Monica Blvd through December 20.
