Alex Israel

American(1982)

Works

Artist Spotlight

Alex Israel, Where Hollywood Dreams Meet Art

There is a particular quality of light in Los Angeles that resists description. It is warm and diffuse, neither fully real nor fully imagined, and it falls across the city with the casual authority of a film set that has been running for a century. No contemporary artist has claimed that light more convincingly than Alex Israel, whose Sky Backdrop paintings have become one of the defining visual signatures of American art in the past decade. When his work was presented at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, visitors encountered something that felt… Continue reading

Pop Art American Artist 21st Century Male Artist Mixed Media Contemporary Artist Contemporary Art Contemporary Landscape American Conceptual Art Acrylic Painting

Back to the Future

Alex Israel makes images, objects and experiences that balance an elevated, almost debased rush of visual pleasure with a scalpel-like intellectual sharpness. Like Los Angeles, the artist’s home and—in many ways his most fertile medium—his works find their depth in the seamlessness of their surface and the artifices that construct them and which they in turn deconstruct. It is clear that the artist, one of the most important voices of his generation, is able to instrumentalize our star-filled and wide-eyed Hollywood dreams and collective memories within a specific lineage of post-war American painting and conceptual, intellectually driven art making.

Sky Backdrop

“I still find beauty in clichés, and I still find hope in the American Dream.” Alex Israel

"Los Angeles is one of the main subjects of my work. Every day is an experience of all of this material, which for me, is an art material. Every day, as I move through this city, I’m experimenting with it. It’s a constant process." Alex Israel

The Bigg Chill; Maltese Falcon; and Risky Business

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Artists in conversation