Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and a selection of new collages by Alexander Ross. This solo exhibition marks the artist’s first with Marianne Boesky Gallery and will run concurrently with a show of the artist’s works on paper at David Nolan Gallery, March 22 – April 19, 2008; opening reception, March 22, 6 – 8pm.
Alexander Ross is one of the most respected painters working today to emerge out of the last decade. The artist’s new paintings take seemingly microscopic views to a disorienting, massive scale. Employing his usual practice, the artist creates his synthetic universe from sculpted Plasticine abstractions that are then photographed and Photoshopped; the manipulated images ultimately replicated in his oil paintings. As such, the organic forms of the paintings have a feeling of being actual acute observations from nature, rather then artificial, invented shapes. The imagery oscillates between the alien and the familiar; constructing enigmatic landscapes and transcendental still lifes.
Ross gives his two dimensional abstractions volume through a variety of tightly controlled brushwork juxtaposed with splotches of impastoed paint. Colors are laid on the canvas in incremental bands of gradated shades. The artist adheres to a consistent set of variables in his process and imagery, and has similarly limited his palette, far and away to what has come to be his signature set of greens. Backgrounds are mostly a hardedged, cool blue with sky-like patterns while the planetary-like blobs, or cells or whatever the abstract forms may be, are mostly various hues of emerald, bilious, and Hulk greens. In these recent paintings though maintaining his formal consistency, Ross has begun widening his color variation, introducing shades of vibrant reds and oranges that lend a luminosity to the immense works.
Alexander Ross lives and works in New York. He was been awarded the Lewis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2004 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2003.