“ I've always been interested in the magic of the movies—in the connection between how they manipulate us and how art can manipulate us." Alex Israel, 2013
This large-scale work by Alex Israel features text painted in acrylic directly onto a stucco surface, mounted within a sleek aluminum frame. The piece reflects Israel's fascination with Hollywood culture and the cinematic experience, drawing a parallel between the seductive power of film and the transformative potential of visual art. The industrial combination of materials — stucco, wood, and aluminum — evokes the constructed facades of Los Angeles architecture, reinforcing the artist's ongoing exploration of surface, illusion, and spectacle.
- Medium
- acrylic on stucco, wood, aluminum frame
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Phillips
🔨 Auction Lot
Contemporary Art Evening Sale
November 13, 2014
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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