Alex Carver

"In my work I have continued to fixate on the conflation of the physical body and the medium of painting as its prosthetic extension, both as a living skin and a conceptual membrane. For me, painting is a literal skin which unspools across culture and history at a civilizational scale, and like our own skin, is a true sensory and metabolic organ. Painting is sensory because it can record its own production so intricately in the form of mark making and is metabolic because it consumes whatever representations we make with it, and then in turn is perceptually consumed in itself by us as viewers.

Over the years this contradictory impulse to experience painting as a skin while also thinking of it as a holographic membrane of information has driven me to produce paintings inspired by equally contradictory source materials. On the one hand the brutality and literalism of body horror in the form of medieval torture, and on the other the sophistication and tool driven progress of the biomedical sphere in the form diagrammatic fragments of patents for surgical robotics, decellularized tissues used in transplant procedures and most recently in the form of the skin graft meshing device".

—Alex Carver

Appropriated texts, fragmented information graphics, mediaeval woodcuts form a dense image ecology in Alex Carver's work. The paintings are populated with mesmerizing braille-like meshes, functioning sometimes as diagrams, spatial coordinates, or appearing like raised wounds over the surface of the skin. Carver’s application of techniques such as frottage produce dense, multilayered, and kaleidoscopic compositions.

Alex Carver (b. 1984) lives and works in Boise. Carver is a graduate of Cooper Union, New York and received his Masters of Fine Arts from Columbia University, New York. Alex Carver’s work has been exhibited and screened in international venues and in festivals including Nahmad Contemporary, New York (2023); Lyles & King, New York (2023); Art Basel Parcours (2023); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2023); Stavanger Art Museum (2023); the Art Encounters Biennial, Romania (2021); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2021); Helena Anrather, New York (2021); Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2019); Tate Modern, London (2018); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2018); Lincoln Center, New York (2016); Berlinale, Berlin (2015); Biennale of Moving Image, Geneva (2014); Melbourne International Film Festival (2014); BAM, New York (2014); Locarno International Film Festival, Locarno (2013); Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancouver (2013).