“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
2011
Alex Israel's large-scale work renders the iconic texture of Los Angeles stucco — a ubiquitous material found on the city's homes, storefronts, and walls — as both subject and medium, blurring the line between art and everyday urban surface. Applied directly onto stucco and mounted within a sleek wood and aluminum frame, the piece elevates the ordinary architecture of LA into a refined artistic statement. Israel transforms the mundane fabric of the city into a canvas, reflecting his ongoing dialogue with Los Angeles as a living, breathing source of creative material.
- Medium
- acrylic on stucco, wood and aluminum frame
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Phillips
🔨 Auction Lot
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale
November 17, 2016
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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