Sky Backdrop
A vast, gradient expanse of pale blue fills the canvas in this serene work by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Israel. Rendered in smooth, flawless acrylic, the painting evokes the perpetually sunny skies of Southern California, stripped of any horizon or landscape. The work reflects Israel's ongoing exploration of Hollywood artifice and idealized imagery, presenting the sky as both backdrop and subject.
- Medium
- acrylic on canvas
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Phillips
🔨 Auction Lot
Contemporary Art Evening Sale
February 12, 2015
More by Alex Israel
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
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.
As It Lays
2012
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