Alex Hubbard (b. 1975, Tolego, Oregon) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work encompasses video art and painting, exploring the boundaries of each via a cross-examination that invigorates both media in new and inventive ways. Constructed along parallel lines, his videos and paintings explore composition, mass, colour and depth of images in unexpected ways. Avoiding a single point of focus, Hubbard constructs his videos in layers, engulfing the viewer with bold colours, performative gestures and evolving, all-over compositions in which movement is multi-directional and time appears to be non-linear. Often described as 'moving paintings', the videos are a record of physical creation and destruction, with the hand of the artist tangible, and sometimes visible, in the frame.
Read MoreIn counterpoint to the videos, Hubbard’s paintings often suggest a mechanical means of production. Fields of colour in fibreglass and resin are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint. Working with fast-drying materials, such as epoxy and latex, the artist is forced to act quickly, embracing chance happenings and revelling in the autonomy of his chosen media. Such anti-hierarchical materials and techniques provide a corollary to the DIY aesthetic of the video works. And through this deconstruction every traditional opposition of the formal language of painting is opened up: figure and ground, material and illusionistic depth, the horizontality of production and the verticality of display.
Text courtesy Simon Lee Gallery.
