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.
Explore Alex Da Corte’s biography, artworks, and past exhibitions.
Artworks
