Alex Becerra (b. 1989)
Alex Becerra approaches painting with the aim to summon embodied responses, enrolling the viewer in an experience that links vision with the emotional body. Using oil-paint in copious qualities, Becerra builds dense surfaces and pictures that are raucous with color, gesture, and images. Often, Becerra’s paintings have an element of montage; many moments in time are layered into a single painting, reflecting the cacophonous and disjointed scroll and distraction of contemporary life. Working in painting, drawing, and sculpture, he explores the way we view modernity, often chopped up into bits and sliced together. Rooted in the deep history of Modern European painting, specifically influenced by German Neo-Expressionism, Becerra has an unparalleled ability in maneuvering oil paint as he layers it on in thick, sweeping lines of impasto raised inches off the canvas. His thoughtful compositions incorporate all classical types of painting from self-portraiture and the female nude to still life and genre scenes, all dotted with recurring context-specific objects like beer bottles and car rims. Seemingly quotidian, these symbols carry personal significance relating to his adolescence in Southern California and subsequent entrance into the international world of art. In this way, Becerra’s highly referential work bears a distinct aesthetic and energetic vibrancy unique to the artist.
Alex Becerra lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected solo exhibitions at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Karma International, Beverly Hills and Zürich, Switzerland; Weiss Berlin, Germany; One Trick Pony, Los Angeles, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, and Levy Delval, Brussels, Belgium. Selected group exhibitions include Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; Kunstraum Potsdam, Germany; Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles; The Journal Gallery, New York; Richard Telles Gallery, Los Angeles; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; and Ben Maltz Gallery, Westchester, California.