ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Alex Da Corte

Alex Da Corte explores the nuances of contemporary life in his videos, installations, paintings, and sculptures, which are often united together in richly-hued, dreamlike environments. With a keen attention to color and form, Da Corte draws from a wide range of sources, including popular and consumer culture, art history, and modern design. Throughout his artistic practice, figures such as Eminem, Allan Kaprow, and the Wicked Witch of the West stand on equal footing alongside objects both commonplace and fantastic.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive

Alex Da Corte, solo exhibition “THE DÆMON” consists of an immersive installation featuring new paintings and sculptures. With a focus on the idea of the home and domesticity, Da Corte has transformed the gallery to evoke a 1960s modern interior. At the installation’s center, a carpeted conversation pit features upholstered sculptures of furniture, lighting, and design objects, which reference iconic mid-century design as well as futuristic furniture seen in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of “A Clockwork Orange”. The titular work of the show, “The Dæmon” (2023), is a painting in twenty-four parts based on diagrams included in Terence Conran’s 1974 publication “The House Book”, here reimagined to include a cat traveling through a house. Several panels depict lamps toppled by the cat, echoing a nearby sculpture of a knocked-over house plant. In another room, a stained-glass window and a neon light shine on an oversized sculpture of a cigarette resting on a mirrored mosaic table. In the words of the artist, “I’ve always wanted to remix objects and recycle them in ways where what they’re representing is not static, it’s constantly in flux”. Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1980 and lives and works in Philadelphia. The artist received his BFA from the University of the Arts in 2004, and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2010. Da Corte creates vibrant and immersive large-scale installations, including wall-based works, sculptures, and videos. Colorful and surreal, his work combines personal narrative, art-historical references, pop-culture characters, and the glossy aesthetics of commercial advertising to reveal the humor, absurdity, and psychological complexity of the images and stories that permeate our culture. Da Corte was raised between Camden, New Jersey; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Caracas, Venezuela. As a child, he aspired to be a Walt Disney animator. References to Disney cartoons and familiar characters from children’s stories, like Frankenstein’s monster and the Wicked Witch of the West, reoccur in his videos alongside anthropomorphized everyday objects such as a bottle of ketchup and pop-culture figures like the rapper Eminem. Da Corte portrays many of the characters in his videos himself. The videos are installed in dreamlike, immersive environments, replete with colorful carpets, brightly painted walls, and neon lights. Underscoring the handmade nature of his work is its sleek and highly stylized appearance; Da Corte works with a team of artists to create every aspect of the videos and installations, from make-up to costumes to set pieces. Da Corte’s contrasting, remixing and flattening of disparate images and icons detaches them from their original meanings, allowing him to concoct new stories about familiar characters with a mixture of empathy, criticism, comedy, and the macabre.

Photo: Alex Da Corte, The Grimalkin 2023, Digital print on poplin, plexiglass, Flashe paint, sequin pins, foam, velvet, hardware, wood frame, 88¾ × 117⅜ × 3 inches; 225 × 298 × 8 cm, © Alex Da Corte, Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1062 North Orange Grove & 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 23/9-4/11/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.matthewmarks.com/