Following his solo exhibition at MOCA Toronto and major billboard commission for the High Line, New York, three of Alex Da Corte’s latest ‘Puffy Paintings’ are on view at Sadie Coles HQ Bury Street in London. Rarely seen serially, this new presentation complements the extensive display of earlier and commissioned upholstered works in the artist’s current museum surveys at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Glenstone, Potomac.
In the form of various flower arrangements, the texturally fresh and soft neoprene surfaces of these sculptural paintings appear as if shaped in modelling clay or children’s play putty before being fixed to the wall. While their glossy appearance conveys a sense of static suspension, their dynamic composition and playful sing-song titles indicate active movement, an underbelly of impermanence and inevitable change.
Together, the trio of floral paintings have the potential to embody seasonal transitions; individually, they represent the many purposes behind the placement or exchange of flowers: care, love, remembrance, celebration, grief. Fleur à Deux features two delicately overlapping picked flowers resembling a crossroads or a pair of reclining lovers – a moment of meeting or spring-like beginning. In The Hearing Trumpet, a bountiful bouquet takes root in the horned instrument – an unlikely yet harmonious home. In Night Flight, a single potted flower is uprooted in a moment of death but also of release; space is created for new life, allowing the cycle to begin again.
Continuing his ongoing practice of reappropriating images from popular culture, Da Corte’s flowers are extracted from renowned comic books. Da Corte rebirths often forgotten or overlooked images in new forms; each expansion beyond the original cartoon saturates the icon with a new presence and energetic sense of life. The ‘Puffy Paintings’ become pop culture snapshots caught in arrested motion, both mimicking and disrupting the intensity of vanitas painting, while also recalling Matisse’s cutout flowers, Jeff Koons’ Mound of Flowers and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's Dropped Bouquet Model. Each neoprene work, part of a larger trajectory of image making, offers a weighty and substantive meditation on the lifespan of images that have appeared in multiple forms and iterations throughout history. They break through the storyboard or screen into the three-dimensional realm, enacting a disorienting perspectival shift that allows each flower to take on a life of its own.
Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden NJ) obtained an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University, New Haven (2010) and a BFA in Printmaking and Fine Arts from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia (2004). Da Corte has exhibited internationally with recent solo presentations including Rubber Pencil Devil, Glenstone, Maryland (2025); The Whale, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2025); Soft Power, The High Line Billboard Commission, New York (2025); Ear Worm, MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2024); Fresh Hell, 21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa (2023); The Street, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of Arts, Philadelphia (2023); ROY G BIV, Luma Westbau, Zurich (2022); Mr. Remember, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2022); As Long as the Sun Lasts, The Roof Garden Commission, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); Rubber Pencil Devil, Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (2020) marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in China; THE SUPƎRMAN, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018); Harvest Moon, New Museum, New York (2017); and Slow Graffiti, Secession, Vienna (2017). Recent group exhibitions include A Rose Is, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2025); SHINE ON, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); A Little After This, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town (2024); Jessica Stockholder: For Events, University of Chicago (2024); Full Burn: Video from the Hammer Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Incarnations: The Body in the macLYON collection, Musée d’art Contemporain, Lyon (2022); In the Line of Flight, for Possible Worlds, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing (2022); Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); New Grit: Art & Philly Now, Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021); THE DREAMERS. The 58th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale 2020 (2020); Topologies of the Real, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2020); May You Live in Interesting Times, 58th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2019); Carnegie International 57th Edition, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2018); Warhol 1968, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2018); and Dreamlands: Immersive Film and Cinema Since 1905, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017). Da Corte was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. In February 2024, Da Corte unveiled his outdoor sculptural installation, As Long as The Sun Lasts (2021), at Glenstone, Maryland. In 2026, with the Whitney Museum’s Meg Onli, Da Corte will co-curate the first Roy Lichtenstein retrospective in New York in more than 30 years.