Mural
Alex Israel
Amalfi Dr.
Le Sirenuse, Positano, Italy
Alex Israel has created Amalfi Dr. (2017), a site-specific mural for the legendary hotel Le Sirenuse in Positano, Italy.
Named after the Pacific Palisades street (that was named after Italy’s most famous coastline), the work unites the landscapes of Israel’s hometown with that of its site and transforms the hotel’s barrel vaulted grand stairwell into a tropical banana palm grove. The banana palm—that ubiquitous symbol of California life and all the good it has to offer—fares equally will in the Mediterranean climate. At Le Sirenuse, robust potted examples grow alongside their newly painted counterparts; fact confronts fiction, reality and fantasy collide.
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Photo by Roberto Salamone
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Installation
Alex Israel
REMEMBR
March 27–30, 2024
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com
Alex Israel’s interactive video installation REMEMBR (2023) will be on view for the first time in Asia at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024. To realize REMEMBR, the artist worked closely with BMW to develop AI technology that collects, filters, and composes content from a smartphone’s camera roll. The resulting montage is choreographed to music and displayed across seven custom-designed screens, each taking the shape of Israel’s iconic profile, arranged around an all-electric BMW i7 sedan. The immersive installation invites visitors to delve into the artist’s hyper-memories and, equally, share their own. Israel comments, “I experience driving as a very inspiring process: it brings back countless memories, sparks my imagination, and helps me to generate new memories and new ideas.” The work will make its European debut in June 2024 at Gagosian, London.
Alex Israel with his video installation REMEMBR (2023) at Art Basel Miami Beach, December 2023. Artwork © Alex Israel. Photo: courtesy Art Basel and BMW
Tour
Alex Israel
Always On My Mind
Wednesday, February 26, 2020, 6:15pm
Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London
Join Gagosian for a tour of Alex Israel: Always On My Mind, an exhibition of new Self-Portraits by the artist, led by Gagosian director Millicent Wilner. In this ongoing series of photorealistic paintings, Israel frames quintessential Los Angeles scenery and snippets from his daily life inside crisp cut-out silhouettes of his own profile. The artist addresses the effortless visual gloss that twenty-first-century image culture and social media demand of their participants. To attend the free event, RSVP to londontours@gagosian.com. Space is limited.
Installation view, Alex Israel: Always On My Mind, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, January 16–March 14, 2020. Artwork © Alex Israel. Photo: Lucy Dawkins
Seminar
Alex Israel, Bettina Korek, Hans Ulrich Obrist
July 29–August 2, 2019, 10am–3pm
Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado
www.andersonranch.org
Alex Israel, Bettina Korek, and Hans Ulrich Obrist will host a five-day seminar for practicing artists at Anderson Ranch. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and critiques, the trio will guide artists deeper into the concepts behind their work and their agency in the art world.
Bettina Korek, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Alex Israel
Francesca Woodman
Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.
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MACK recently published Sofia Coppola: Archive 1999–2023, the first publication to chronicle Coppola’s entire body of work in cinema. Comprised of the filmmaker’s personal photographs, developmental materials, drafted and annotated scripts, collages, and unseen behind-the-scenes photography from all of her films, the monograph offers readers an intimate look into the process behind these films.
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Adaptability
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