Isabel Sullivan Gallery presents Clouds Of Limitless And Expanding Joy, an exhibition of twelve new paintings by British artist Hugo Winder-Lind, debuting his first solo exhibition in the United States. The works reflect the artist’s conviction that animals and the natural world deserve the same admiration and respect as humans. Winder-Lind’s landscapes become sites of transformation and ritual, offering a renewed attention to the physical and elemental world.

Drawing from both religious and scientific ontologies, the work echoes medieval doom painting’s appetite for judgment, transformation, and collective reckoning. A centerpiece of the exhibition is the hauntingly powerful “Crowd of the Damned” measuring 7 x 8 feet, Winder-Lind’s largest painting to date. Sheep are painted in cloud-like masses, floating across each other in soft, gentle, rows. While almost absurd in their weightless appearance, these animals carry a deep political and historical lineage. Bred during the agricultural revolution, they were used as tools of colonization and land control, unknowingly transforming wild land into pasture, and providing food and clothing. Sheep are culturally dismissed as “stupid,” despite their enormous impact. The paintings express liberation, honor, and respect towards them.

There’s a deep connection to the British landscape in Hugo’s work —moorland and vegetation, mist, the psychic charge of rural space—but it’s filtered through a contemporary appetite for ambiguity. The blues and cold greens read like a place where fog clings to everything. Even when the paint is loose, there’s an almost physical density to it, like you could press a thumb into the surface and come away smelling peat and wet grass.

In several paintings, a red register enters like a front moving in. Figures emerge as luminous silhouettes rendered a molten red, the same red as the blood in our bodies or the core of the earth. They appear in states of urgency, release, ascent, or collapse. Surfaces stay active, keeping the image in motion. In these red paintings, the land turns ember-hot. The figures flare up like sparks thrown from a bonfire, running, falling, lifting their arms into a sky that feels too big for the human body.

The works displayed in the exhibition mark a shift in scale, at some points gigantic and overwhelming, and at others intimate and detailed. They invite the viewer to step into grand scenes underpinned by primordial forces. Winder-Lind explores the belief that consciousness is universally inherent to all things: that sheep, birds, mountains, and clouds are all manifestations of the universe, reflected back at us through layers of emotional and symbolic significance. At its core, this body of work is an inquiry into what it means to exist as matter and perception — a physical body moving through an energetic universe.