Alexander Gorlizki

Alexander Gorlizki’s works on found paper, book pages, and photographs create intricate and dense worlds with quirky characters and pattern-filled abstractions. Mixing Eastern and Western iconographies with realistic and imaginatively depicted personae, Gorlizki presents witty, surreal scenarios often suggesting a narrative or happening, and other times rooted in pure abstraction. In There’s Someone Else, rolling turquoise hills have a Buddha-like head at their apex, in this case a photograph of Lana Turner, her hair replaced with leafy plant life. Various figures and forms pepper the page including a light bulb sporting underwear and a rendition of Dante staring across the scene.

Much of the imagery has roots in the artist’s interest in the applied arts and design ranging from traditional Afghan textiles to medieval tapestries and Russian ceramics from the 1920s. The interplay between various cultural iconographies is echoed in the production methods of the work. For nearly two decades, Gorlizki has commissioned a wide range of artisans and craftspeople specializing in highly skilled, traditional techniques; the most long-standing of these creative relationships is with Riyaz Uddin, a master miniaturist painter in Jaipur, India, with whom Gorlizki established an atelier in 1996.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented by Kudlek van der Grinten Galerie in Cologne, Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles, The Crow Collection in Dallas, and Van Doren Waxter in New York, among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as Greve, Paris, Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Denver Art Museum, Royal Museum of Ontario in Toronto, The Wassaic Project, and Barbican Centre in London.

Courtesy of Van Doren Waxter