Alex Hubbard

Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Athens, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, The Basement of Alamo, 2011

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Alex Hubbard’s art innovatively engages with both film and painting to create a distinctive pictorial lexicon. Profoundly inspired by the Canadian experimental film-maker Michael Snow’s cross-media strategy where film is made as though a painter, painting as though a sculptor and sculpture as though a musician, Hubbard’s videos and paintings explore both the reception and construction of both media in surprising and fascinating ways. In the shallow, canvas-like frame of the artist’s videos, objects crash, collide and push past each other in a beautifully frenetic kind of choreography. Hubbard's paintings are a counterpoint and natural extension of his video pieces. The present work perfectly realises this; caught as though in a permanent state of flux, great incandescent swirls of magenta and violet paint are stencilled and trowelled onto the canvas, interrupted by glossy pools of resin and patches of fiberglass. Indeed, as the artist describes “with these resin paintings I pour the resin onto the fiberglass and have 20–30 minutes before they dry. The mechanics of me pushing resin into the fiberglass before it dries becomes the gesture, one that looks painterly but is borrowed from the labour of making the thing” (Alex Hubbard in conversation with Maragret Knowles, Art In America, 18 February 2010, online resource). In doing so, Untitled strikingly immortalises a moment in time and pushes the boundaries of picture and film-making in an entirely unforeseen direction.

In recent years Hubbard’s art has been increasingly recognised on the international stage with major exhibitions at renowned institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art (PS1), New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Tate, St Ives.