Alejandro Cardenas Unveils New Paintings and Sculptures of Faceless Humanoids
As part of his first solo exhibition in NYC’s Almine Rech gallery.
Alejandro Cardenas is the Chilean artist best known for his interdisciplinary artworks that portray acrobatic, fluid characters set against lush landscapes and surrealist interiors. Cardenas has also served as the lead textile designer and art director for the influential fashion label Proenza Schouler for over a decade. He was also a founding member of Lansing-Dreiden — a New York-based transdisciplinary art collective that created musical albums, a literary journal, and artworks.
The artist is currently the focus of a solo exhibition at New York City’s Almine Rech gallery. Entitled “Alexandria,” Cardenas unveils new abstract figurations across paintings and sculpture in the presentation that explore a post-human world “wherein the relationship between human-forms and the environment is one of unity and coexistence,” described the gallery in a statement.
The title of the exhibition, “Alexandria,” is a cheeky reference to the artist himself, but also the Egyptian city. “The intellectual and cultural center of the ancient Mediterranean world for much of the Hellenistic age and known to be a place where scholarship of the East and the West was studied on an equal footing with the goal of creating a unified source of knowledge,” as per a statement. “Cardenas’s new body of work, which comes at a time of profound global unrest that has resulted from rampant climate change, the ongoing health, and economic crises, and social injustice, came forth as a way to reflect on the present moment.”
Cardenas champions the human body language in his studio practice that is populated with faceless humanoids of various forms and postures. His narrow wire-frame sculptures and subject matter are often composed of colorful patterns of zigzagging lines that lie, sit or stand casually in minimalist architectural environments. “Unlike us, these faceless humanoids appear to lack all sensory organs, yet they are not deprived of their sensorial ability. Instead, they convey emotion through body language, resulting in a wide variety of suggested emotional expression.”
Check out installation views for “Alexandria” in the slideshow above. The exhibition is on view through February 23, 2021, visit Almine Rech’s website to learn more.
Elsewhere in art, Pieter Ceizer has made a selection of cheerful wooden sculptures for Valentine’s Day.
Almine Rech
39 East 78th Street
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10075
