Roslyn native Alex Gross makes his home in Los Angeles these days, but for October and the first week of November, he will make a triumphant return to New York as his exhibit, Future Tens,e will be on display at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery. The exhibit will run from Thursday, Oct. 9 through Sunday, Nov. 8.
The opening reception is Oct. 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. The gallery has locations at both 557C West 23rd St. and 529 West 20th St., in Manhattan. Gross’ work will be at the West 23rd Street gallery.
The exhibit is a combination of new oil paintings and mixed media works. It will also be Gross’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. In conjunction with Future Tense, the artist will release a new monograph published by Gingko Press, which shares its title with the show and features 40 paintings completed between 2010 and 2014.
According to the curators, Gross, in the exhibit, portrays mankind as apathetically living in a world overwhelmed by advertising and propaganda. Captivated by technological devices and strategically branded products, his vacant and desensitized subjects appear before industrial factories, in television newsrooms, hyper-urban cityscapes or the bucolic countryside.
Gross’ paintings suggest that, in our culture, it is impossible to escape from corporate influence. In this exhibition, the artist expands upon themes of consumerism, industrialization and the omnipresent media, carefully treading the line between imaginary dreamscape and sociopolitical commentary.
His work represents the psychological state of contemporary society and our inability to exist in the present moment.
In addition to new works on canvas, Future Tense also features Gross’ cabinet card paintings, a series of works painted on antique Victorian photographs dating from the 1880s to the early 1900s. Using mixed media, Gross re-imagines the subjects of these portraits as pop culture characters from film, television or comics.
“Alex Gross’s surrealistic paintings are beautifully rendered and seductive, and his integration of consumer culture motifs and modern tech devices presents an unsettling collision of worlds,” said the art critic, Shepard Fairey. “He creates a masterful tension between lush, escapist beauty and the anxiety inducing emblems of our white-noise-plagued modern world.”
Gross was born and raised in Roslyn Heights and, as noted, is currently based in Los Angeles. In 1990, he received a BFA with honors from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
In 2007, Gross’ work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, Calif. Gross is a recipient of the Artist’s Fellowship from the Japan Foundation, and several faculty grants from Art Center College of Design. Chronicle Books published his first monograph, The Art of Alex Gross that same year. Gingko published his second monograph, Discrepancies, in 2010 and a collection of his cabinet card series in 2012, called Now and Then: The Cabinet Card Paintings of Alex Gross.
For further information, visit: www.jonathanlevinegallery.com, email:info@jonathanlevinegallery.com or call: 212-243-3822.
