American artist Alexander Ross is known for painting hybrid plant and rock forms in vivid shades of colour. First photographed then altered through Photoshop, graphic detailed surfaces are replicated through oil on canvas, resulting in organic forms that are at once naturalistic and surreal.
Read MoreBorn in Denver, Colorado, Ross attended Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he graduated with a BFA in 1983.
Alexander Ross' surrealist paintings and drawings depict vibrant plant and rock forms that begin as three-dimensional models of plasticine figures inspired by natural and inanimate objects.
Ross' early works include graphite drawings that depict plant cells of different shapes, texture, and size. All untitled and rendered in varying shades of green, the drawings appear to offer an in-depth examination of living forms, as if seen under a microscope.
In Untitled (1994), detailed pastel green surfaces are rendered from a blend of coloured pencil and watercolour with the same precision as photographic images, recalling the textured surfaces of biological display models.
Veering towards the alien, Untitled (1995–1995) hints at the more sinister nuances of life and procreation, with a dense aggregation of pale pink cells of different sizes in eye-like formations.
Ross' paintings begin as plasticine models, which are then photographed and edited in Photoshop, resulting in a post-Internet, animation-like quality and the artist's distinct plastic-like texture.
Works made in the late 1990s are almost sculptural, showing various plant life rendered as simple round and undulating forms in yellow and green. Set against a pale blue sky, they appear to hover in space, not entirely natural nor alien.
In the early 2000s, Ross returned to drawings on paper in coloured pencil, presenting two-dimensional plant forms as simple outlines of vegetation in Untitled (2000) or as a cartoonish creature-like plant with dotted eyes in Untitled (2005).
Increasingly detailed and abstracted, works like Untitled (2013), which depicts cells of varying colour and shape growing on top of a smaller rows of monochrome cells, show surreal compositions nonetheless grounded in organic forms and colours.
The sculptural assemblage Drawing Construction I (2016), a blend of ink, paint, wood, and cloth painted green and red against a scribbled board, hints at the materiality of cellular matter by replicating their messy configurations as a blend of protruding textures and shapes.
Later works forgo the third dimension, nonetheless retaining their enticing textures and at times recovering the smoothness of plasticine as in Untitled (2021), which shows cells framed by vibrant leaves painted green, yellow, red, and pink.
Other works, like Untitled (2019), make use of the grainy texture of graphite to produce organic surfaces like the veiny texture of plants and roots or the thick fissures of tree bark, the combination of materials blending analogue and digital, fact and fiction.
Ross is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2020), a New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship (2010), the Lewis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2006), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002).
Alexander Ross' works have been shown widely in the United States and Europe.
Select solo exhibitions include Fiendish Plots, Lincoln, Nebraska (2019); LABspace, Hillsdale, New York (2016); David Nolan Gallery, New York (2014, 2011); Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2013); Nolan Judin, Berlin (2012); New York Foundation of the Arts, Brooklyn (2011); Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2008); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2005); and Kevin Bruk Gallery, Miami (2004).
Select group exhibitions include Platform Space, Brooklyn (2019); Clemente Soto, New York (2019); Wild Palms, Dusseldorf (2019); University Art Museum at SUNY, Albany (2016); James Center for the Arts, New York (2015); Red Bull Studios, New York (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art, Valencia (2009); and Denver Museum of Art (2009).
Alexander Ross' website can be found here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2021
