Noire Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition of American artist Alex Sewell Back to the Future. This show marks Sewell’s first collaboration with the gallery.
Alex Sewell’s work is largely informed by his personal narrative, and partly reflects the culture and customs of his youth. He utilizes semiotics and direct compositions to invite the viewer to inspect and feel an association with the subjects presented which appear as interstitial totems of a larger story. Text and doodles dot the work with bits of aesthetic deskilling, drawings with rigid and clumsy tools that help unite the work through a recurring dichotomy executed in a shallow depth of field. His ability to mimic pixel with oil, or wood grain with fabric weave, sets the stage for a switch between real, imaginative, and digital representations.
Back to the Future will be on show through February 2022 featuring artworks created uniquely for the spaces of Noire Gallery. Sewell, who together with his life partner had found his way to Torino through the pandemic, lived his lockdown within the city confines and gallery studio creating the artworks for this exhibition. “The reality of everything let me make simpler works that meant more to me, no attention given about how they would seem or be received, just really boiled down feelings that I had, and wanted to share” explains Sewell. He conceived the artworks with his home country America in mind, wearing his emotions like festive clothes to express his narrative of the unprecedented and troublesome times we all lived through recently.
Sewell currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Following his time as an assistant sculptor/painter of artists Jeff Koons and Bjarne Melgaard, he has had his work featured alongside Jim Dine’s poetry at Hauser & Wirth, NY. He has exhibited at Blake & Vargas, Berlin, Big Pictures Los Angeles, CA, the Museum or Fine Arts Boston, MA, the Danforth Museum, MA, the Monmouth Museum, NJ, Freight + Volume, Five Myles, and Spring/Break, New York. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Artnet, and can be found in the permanent collections of Enterprise Bank, Lowell, MA and Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, and the National Gallery of Bermuda, among others.
A special thanks to Totah Gallery.
