“I still find beauty in clichés, and I still find hope in the American Dream.” Alex Israel
Alex Israel's large-scale acrylic painting on stucco panel presents a smooth, sun-drenched gradient sky rendered in the soft, idealized palette synonymous with Southern California. The work embodies Israel's signature blending of fine art and pop culture, evoking the aesthetic language of Hollywood backdrops, billboard advertisements, and cinematic fantasy. Through its deceptively simple composition, the piece invites reflection on the seductive power of collective myths and the enduring, if complicated, allure of the American Dream.
- Medium
- acrylic on stucco panel
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Phillips
🔨 Auction Lot
20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
November 8, 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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