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Alexander Harrison

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  • Biography
    View works. Alexander Harrison, Alexander's Moon, 2023
    Alexander's Moon, 2023
    View works
    Born in Greenville, South Carolina, 1993
    Lives & Works in New York, New York
    Download Artist CV (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
    Download Selected Press (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
  • Alexander Harrison’s enigmatic paintings of dreamscapes and object-symbols blend illusion and fantasy with archetypes from cultural history to render a...
    Portrait by Diego Flores.

    Alexander Harrison’s enigmatic paintings of dreamscapes and object-symbols blend illusion and fantasy with archetypes from cultural history to render a vivid universe that is at once inviting and inaccessible. Mining his experiences growing up in Marietta, South Carolina, Harrison explores the psychic reverberations of America’s deeply entrenched racism, as well as the role of the artist and the responsibilities inherent in representation. These themes emerge in Harrison’s work through the motif of the Black cowboy, a persona partially based on the artist’s own grandfather. This character recurs as both a proxy for the artistic figure and for the manner in which Black masculinity has historically been stereotyped in popular culture, where representations have routinely lacked nuance. Harrison’s cowboy exists in riposte to these fallacies, offering instead a hero that emanates self-determination, philosophical depth, and sovereignty over his land. Even when the cowboy is absent from Harrison’s compositions, his searching gaze is implied by the perspective of the scenes depicted, allowing us to catch glimpses of his onward journey.

    The artist’s use of distinctive framing strategies, realized primarily through the use of trompe l’oeil, allow lifelike materials such as clapboard window frames and the bare stone walls of prison cells to determine the picture plane. Playing with depth and perspective, Harrison sets up these paintings as portals into a world of elusive narratives brimming with searching, loneliness, and entrapment.

  • Harrison engages with a history of surrealism and the supernatural. The artist returns repeatedly to symbols loaded with art historical and religious folklore, such as the apple and the moon, as well as those co-opted by racist caricature, such as the watermelon. Appearing across his oeuvre, these motifs create an immersive universe, heightening the uncanny dissonance one feels when observing a whole rendered in fragments. Memento moris appear in the form of flowers, heavy-headed and drooping with melancholic candor in the moonlight. Working directly from an inner consciousness, Harrison brings myriad metaphysical references into his compositions, loading the work with an ineffable talismanic quality especially present in the artist’s intimately-scaled work.

    Through the painstaking application of layers of acrylic on panel, Harrison conceptualizes the contrast between light and shadow, a tactic employed by the painters of the Italian Renaissance. Rarely depicting direct light, the artist favors the reflections occasioned by the surfaces of his symbolist images, including the moon and a glowing cobweb, or in one instance, an emotionally-charged close-up of an eye looking out at the viewer.

    Harrison studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. His first solo exhibition with Kasmin opened in January 2023. Additional solo exhibitions have been staged at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA; Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and NADA Miami, FL. Harrison has been in group exhibitions at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; the Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Germany; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Hesse Flatow, New York, NY; Richard Heller, Los Angeles, CA; 0.0 LA, Los Angeles, CA; Hotel Art Pavilion, Brooklyn, NY; Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Smoke the Moon, Santa Fe, NM, in addition to Kasmin. His work is held in private and public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Hall Art Foundation, North Adams, MA.  

  • Works
    Alexander Harrison, Red Delicious, 2020

    Alexander Harrison

    Red Delicious, 2020
    acrylic on paper
    9 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches
    23.5 x 23.5 cm
    Copyright The Artist
  • Exhibitions
    • Alexander Harrison: Big World

      Alexander Harrison: Big World

      January 12 – March 4, 2023 514 West 28th Street, New York
      Alexander Harrison’s Big World will bring together fifteen enigmatic and intimately-scaled new paintings by the artist whose dreamscapes and object-symbols blend illusion and fantasy with archetypes from cultural history. This is Harrison’s first solo exhibition at Kasmin.
      View More
    • New Old Histories

      New Old Histories

      May 21 – June 26, 2021 297 Tenth Avenue, New York
      View More
  • The Kasmin Review

    Studio Visit Alexander Harrison's Fever Dream For Alexander Harrison's first solo exhibition at Kasmin, Big World, Chicago-based writer Camille Bacon...

    Studio Visit

    Alexander Harrison's Fever Dream

    For Alexander Harrison's first solo exhibition at Kasmin, Big World, Chicago-based writer Camille Bacon spoke with the artist to unravel the formal and spiritual intricacies of his latest body of work.

     

    Read More

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509 West 27th Street

New York
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm
+1 212 563 4474
info@kasmingallery.com

 

297 Tenth Avenue

New York
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm
+1 212 563 4474
info@kasmingallery.com

 

Kasmin Sculpture Garden

New York
On view from The High Line at 27th Street
Monday–Sunday, 7am-11pm
+1 212 563 4474
info@kasmingallery.com

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