Nolan Judin is pleased to present 20 new paintings and drawings in Terrestrial Exemplars, the gallery’s second exhibition with Alexander Ross in Berlin.
The studio of the New York artist is best described as a laboratory where the natural and artistic worlds collide. His working-process is experimental, yet essentially simple. Each work begins with the creation of plasticine models that suggest cellular structures, plants or scientific specimens. After photographing the models and manipulating the resulting images, he paints these newly altered and digitized realities.
Ross creates worlds that appear to be scientifically accurate, while they originate entirely in the artist’s imagination. The suggestive power of his paintings lies in the synthesis of abstraction and representation, nature and artifice and in his playful use of scale. Known for his color palette of muted greens, grays, and blues, Ross meticulously works the surface of his paintings to give it a synthetic quality. He creates scenes that are reminiscent of science fiction films but at the same time carry natural landscapes and ecological elements. The forms he employs look computer generated, emphasizing their otherworldliness.
Recently, Ross has become inspired by the tradition of painting en plein air. This new interest has expanded his practice in the studio to evoke the spontaneity and romance of recreating nature as if he were outdoors. For the first time, realistic landscapes appear in his paintings as though we are viewing the scenes from an airplane or mountain. The light and colors of these new works are more vibrant, but still have the flat graphic quality that is the artist’s signature. They embrace notions of virtuality, spanning from Yves Tanguy’s iconic skies to the contemporary aesthetics of Google Maps.
Born in Denver, Colorado in 1960, Alexander Ross earned his B.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art in 1983. His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide since the mid 1990s. In 2005, he was part of the pivotal group show Remote Viewing at the Whitney Museum of American Art, propelling his name into the international spotlight. The same year, he was honored with a solo show at The Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis that surveyed the previous eight years of his work. Many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, have acquired his work for their permanent collections.
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Alexander Ross, Untitled, 2011