Alexa Guariglia

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present The Lost and Found, an exhibition of new works by Alexa Guariglia.

Alexa Guariglia’s work is grounded in an ongoing and idiosyncratic negotiation between drawing and painting. While the artist’s characteristic line is rhythmic, expressive, and psychological, she uses painterly swaths of rich color, simultaneous contrast, and tone with phenomenological intention. With practice the two disciplines have found symbiosis, existing with equal weight.

In The Lost and Found, Guariglia uses the site of the artists’ studio as a device to explore narrative that operates without beginning or end, a reflection of our fraught attempt at contending with the present moment. Objects whirl around with frenetic energy, while moments in flux are simultaneously made static. Figures are monumental and self-aware, the gravity of which functions as an anchor in a space otherwise unfixed.

Figures in each piece are set in impossibly dynamic positions and emerge from worlds they create, construct, and occupy. Magazine pages rapidly unfurl and cascade from top to bottom, both enveloping and overwhelming with all that remains unread. Regrets and receipts coalesce in the same filing cabinet, at once sharing physical space while occupying different metaphysical planes. Images as ideas set off like fireworks.

Alexa Guariglia (b. 1990, Brooklyn, New York) studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her works have been the subject of five previous solo exhibitions at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles, and have been included in group presentations at galleries in Boston, New York, and Beijing. She lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.