Los Angeles, CA – Alex Stern presents new works in his exhibition Stars at The Cabin LA, opening Sunday, October 29th, 3-6 PM, and on view throughout November. Proceeds from the exhibition will go to United Hatzalah and Doctors Without Borders. 

As a foundational notion of painting, Stern writes: “A painting is a transmitter. The transmission is where the art lives, out in front of the object, and the circuit is completed by the viewer. Painting is a conceptual endeavor, and the painting surface is best suited for transmission when it holds contradictions. In my work, the more outsized the concept, and the more personal and complex the contradictions, the better. In this frequency field I’m most attracted to a condition of hyper-directness leading to abstraction. Not necessarily physical painterly abstraction, but more a relational abstraction pointed toward ultimate acceptance in the audience.”

These paintings are about using an icon as a tool to make a painting, and therefore ultimately about paint, painting, materiality and object-hood. Stars utilizes this known symbol directly as an opportunity for what the artist calls precise abstraction. This work is responding to a lineage of painters toeing the line between picture, image, painting, sculpture and flag or sign – A formal exercise of painting construction where color is materiality alongside line, shape, texture etc.

This body of work responds to Jasper Johns (target paintings, flag paintings) and other artists like Albers, Kounellis, Stella, Sillman, Marden and many more predecessors participating in this same discourse – always moving with an openness to put the painting first, as the master of its own ability to succeed.

For Stern, the crux of being an artist and making paintings is best articulated by the Jasper Johns mantra: You avoid everything you can avoid, then you do what you can’t avoid doing, and you do what is helpless and unavoidable.

You do what is helpless.

This work is also at least partially positioned at the intersection of contemporary American Judaism, Jewish culture, and the new resonance of American anti-semitism and broader American division. Stern is energized by a protective reverence for his culture, its ethics and value system, a kind of competence – especially its roots in building American institutions around creativity and beyond. To this end, the paintings are shields and badges of honor.

Stern is also interested in the intersection where this reverence collides with shame and confusion as it relates to Israel and military atrocities in the Middle East, but also personal histories. These are the most vital contradictions in the work – layered contradictions simultaneously carrying hope, guilt, pride, repulsion, serenity and discomfort.

Stern says: “I also think of the work as symbolic of my personal manifesto about art as religion – Art practice as a form of prayer-like participation in life from the vantage point of death and eternity. This Star of David iconography and a sculptural frontality results in a specific kind of object-hood. The works are transmitting a kind of sacred frequency, but also the artist’s frequency – The artist standing in front of the object, at work. So like all paintings, they are recording devices.

“I find myself in the studio making these paintings a couple years after collaborative projects with Kanye West. I stepped away from these projects just months before his comments about Jewish people came out – I had accepted a professorship at UT Knoxville. When I finished my one year stint at UT, I returned to LA and felt an added degree of energy for the project, based on this personal history.”

BIOGRAPHY:

Alex Stern lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in Studio Art from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his MFA in Painting from Boston University. He was awarded the Kahn Prize and the Joseph Ablow Memorial Painting Prize from Boston University in 2020. In the same year, he was featured in New American Paintings. In 2021 he was awarded residencies at MASS MoCA and CalArts in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth. Stern has recently participated in group exhibitions in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Knoxville and will be featured in an upcoming show at Pace, NYC. He presented a solo exhibition with Tase Gallery in Los Angeles in 2021 and a solo exhibition with Trotter & Sholer in New York City in 2022. Upcoming solo exhibitions include The Cabin, LA, Trotter & Sholer, NYC, and Pio Pico, LA. Stern has also worked as a collaborator with many artists including Pharrell Williams, Hedi Slimane and Vanessa Beecroft. Publications featuring Stern’s work include ArtForum, Office Magazine, Cultbytes, The Art Newspaper, NPR, and the New York Times. Stern has just completed serving a 1-year professorship in painting and drawing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

STATEMENT:

The cross examination of art-history and contemporary culture from my personal vantage point yields a resonance of ideas from varied perspectives. Making paintings is a prayer-like practice, meditating on the unknown known, the unnamable—a transformative space where the subjective converts to the objective—all while contributing to and participating in a discourse that spans a wider continuum of history. While I approach my studio with specific conceptual and formal objectives, the success of my artwork relies on an openness and freedom to shift or undo original intentions. By relinquishing partial control to the media itself, I allow it to inform new and evolving inquiry and, in turn, varied opticality. Contradiction, collision, and free association work in unison to reject personal and societal convictions, while arriving at a dynamic yet precisely finished facture. It is this process and a disciplined life routine outside of the studio, coupled with a complex evaluation of my personal history that defines my work.

Website: https://alexsternstudio.com 
Instagram: @alexzstern