Alex Israel

Alex Israel (born 1982) is multimedia artist, writer, and eyewear designer born and based in LA. Deeply entwined with his hometown, his work explores popular media, Hollywood, and the cult of celebrity, while positing LA as central to an understanding of American culture and the American dream. He is known for his large, colorful airbrushed paintings of abstract gradients and Los Angeles skies, his Self-Portraits, painted on shaped Fiberglass panels, and multimedia installations constructed from movie-house props. His works are often made on the backlot of Warner Bros. Studios.

Early life and education

The son of a real estate developer, Israel grew up in Westwood alongside two sisters. He attended Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City before completing his undergraduate studies at Yale University in 2003.^[1] While at Yale, Israel missed LA, and was eager to return to the west coast. His first summer back from Yale, he worked part time as an intern for the conceptual artist John Baldessari, and for Ann Goldstein, who was a curator at MOCA at the time. Later, he worked as an assistant at the gallery Blum & Poe before moving to New York to work at Sotheby’s auction house.^[2] After working for the artist Jason Rhoades, followed by a brief stint as a salesperson for Hauser & Wirth, he ultimately decided that his passion lied in creating, not selling, art. He went on to receive a M.F.A. from the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts in 2010.^[3]

Selected Museum Collections

Work by Alex Israel is included in the collections of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,MoMA, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo.^[4]

Web Series

AS IT LAYS

Between July 2011 and May 2012, Israel produced a web series called, “AS IT LAYS,” in which he interviews 33 LA celebrities in an unresponsive, deadpan persona. The diverse group of subjects includes Rachel Zoe, Oliver Stone, Perez Hilton, Michael Chow, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Marilyn Manson. The first thirty videos were shot in the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, and on location at the subjects’ homes and offices. The series premiered during an exhibition at Reena Spauldings Fine Art March 11 through April 8, 2012. The first thirty videos were released online at asitlays.com.^[5]

On May 19, 2012, The MOCA LA presented the series as a special one-night screening and performance event. In between screenings of video portraits, Israel created three additional interviews with surprise guests Laird Hamilton, Molly Ringwald and Melanie Griffith, in front of the live audience.^[6] Israel’s introduction to each interview is comically well rehearsed and he refuses to acknowledge the interviewee’s responses or ask follow-up questions, no matter how deep or thought-provoking the answers are. Instead, he works through a set of pre-made questions that he has written on flashcards. The questions range from “Are you more sympathetic to vampires or werewolves?” to “What kind of milk do you buy at the grocery store?”^[7] Avoiding topics directly related to work, Israel's questions are meant to reveal his subjects' personal affects and characteristics. His repetitive performance allows him, as monotone interlocutor, to disappear, and enables the viewer to focus fully on the subject. In this way, Israel considers each episode to be a portrait, its goal, in the traditional sense of portraiture, to capture each subject's likeness.

Easter Island Venice Beach (Sculpture and Web Series)

From July 13–15, 2012, “Easter Island Venice Beach” was erected in the recreational area of Venice Beach as part of the Hammer Museum’s Venice Beach Biennial. Curated by Ali Subotnik,^[8] the installation plays off of the moai, large, monolithic human figures carved between 1250 and 1500 A.D. on Easter Island in the southeastern Pacific Island.^[9] Israel says that he was inspired when he found four giant replicas of the sculptures at a prop house in Hollywood a few years earlier.^[10] The website, easterislandvenicebeach.com, features a short film (2 minutes, 16 seconds) that allows audiences to experience his installation from a birds-eye view.

Rough Winds

The first of his video series, produced in 2010, invites viewers to “watch and follow the lives of jaded young adults as they navigate the golden light and melancholic shadows of life in the magical dreamscape of Los Angeles.”^[11] The dialogue-free series is composed of a trailer and ten clips between two and six minutes long. Modeled after Southern California-set shows like Laguna Beach, and Beverly Hills 90210, his series examines the stereotype of disaffected LA youth.^[12] The trailer was displayed on a videotron along Sunset Boulevard during the summer of 2010. It can be viewed on roughwinds.com.

SPF18

Israel’s latest project, SPF 18, is a feature-length teen surf film and multi-platform project. The film will initially be screened at high schools around the country.^[13] Israel hopes that the coming-of-age story will be able to reach and inspire young adults; a group that he feels has never been enfranchised by the art world.^[14] He plans to distribute his own brand of sunscreen, cleverly named Icarus, along with the release.^[14] The mythological story of Icarus involves a young man who died when his he flew too close to the sun. Thus, the name can refer to the way today’s younger generations act and feel as if they are invincible.

Eyewear

Freeway Eyewear, founded by Alex Israel, debuted its original seven styles in spring of 2010. The brand takes draws inspiration from the “network of asphalt arteries that are both cause and effect of the rhizomatic sprawl of Southern California.” The first six styles take their name from iconic routes, 1– Pacific Coast Highway, 10– Santa Monica Freeway, 15- Interstate 15, 101– El Camino Real, 110– Harbor Freeway, and 405– San Diego Freeway, while the seventh, LA Rays, pays tribute to Ray-Ban, the acme of fashionable west coast eyewear.^[15] Since then, three more styles have been added to the collection, 66- Historic Route 66 105- The 105, and 134- Ventura Freeway. The sunglasses retail for $100 each and are all unisex. They are sold at Dover Street Market, Maxfield, and online at freewayeyewear.com.^[16]

As an artist, Israel is often asked about the significance of his sunglasses and whether or not they are meant to be art. Israel clarified his purpose in an interview in 2013:

“My sunglasses are not my art, it’s just a sunglasses brand, and it’s important for me to be clear about that; that not everything that I do has to be art. I like working in different platforms, I’m interested in various media, sometimes its art and sometimes its not. But when it came down to making my sunglasses it was really important to me that they drove the same vocabulary of references that was inspiring my work. A lot of those things relate to the aesthetics that are very regional in southern California.”^[17]

Solo and Two-Person Exhibitions

2016: #Alex Israel. Astrup Feranley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway.^[18]

Alex Israel / Bret Easton Ellis. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA.^[4]

2015: Alex Israel at The Huntington. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA.^[19]

Sightings: Alex Israel. Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX.^[20]

Alex Israel: Summer. Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, France.^[21]

2014: Mirage. Reena Spaulings, New York, NY.^[22]

Kathryn Andrews | Alex Israel. Gagosian Gallery, Rome, Italy.^[23]

Still Life: Dan Flavin/ Alex Israel. Nahmad Contemporary Art, New York, NY.^[24]

2013: Alex Israel: Isbrytaren. Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, Sweden.^[25]

Alex Israel. New Holland, Saint Petersburg, Russia.^[26]

Alex Israel. Le Consortium, Dijon, France.^[4]

Alex Israel, Curated by Lauri Firstenberg. LAXART, Los Angeles, CA.^[4]

Alex Israel: Self-Portraits. Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany.^[4]

Alex Israel: Lens. LAXART, Los Angeles CA.^[27]

2010: Property. University of Southern California, The Roski MFA Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.^[4]

Group Exhibitions

2016: Take Me (I’m Yours). Jewish Museum, New York, NY.^[28]

Progressive Praxis. De la Cruz Collection, Miami, FL.^[4]

2015: Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism. Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Germany.^[29]

The Shell (Landscapes, Portraits & Shapes). Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, France.^[30]

2014: From the Collection. De La Cruz Collection, Miami, FL.^[4]

The Los Angeles Project. Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China.^[31]

Platform. Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, Belgium.^[32]

Rockaway! Fort Tilden and Rockaway Beach, New York, NY.^[33]

Oracular / Vernacular. MAMO - Centre d'Art de la Cité Radieuse, Marseille, France.^[4]

2013: Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream. Greene Naftali, New York, NY.^[4]

Noa Noa. Metro Pictures, New York, NY.^[4]

Young Collectors. Maison Particulière, Brussels, Belgium.^[4]

Lies about Painting. Moderna Museet, Malmo, Sweden.^[34]

After Hours 2: Murals on the Bowery. Presented by Art Production Fund, The Bowery, New York, NY.^[34]

Transforming the known. Bert Kreuk Collection, Gemeente Museum, The Hague, Netherlands.^[35]

Out of Memory, curated by Eleanor Cayre. Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY.^[36]

Looking Back/The 7th White Columns Anuual, selected by Richard Birkett, White Columns, New York, NY.^[4]

DSM-V, curated by David Rimanelli. presented by Vito Schnabel, New York, NY.^[4]

From The Collection: 2013 Exhibition. De La Cruz Collection, Miami, FL.^[4]

2012: Hammer Museum's Venice Beach Biennial, Curated by Ali Subotnick, Los Angeles, CA.^[37]

Standard Operating Procedure, Curated by Piper Marshall. Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA.^[38]

2011: Greater L.A. New York, NY.^[4]

Work After Work. Mackee Apartments at the Schindler House, Los Angeles, CA.^[4]

2010: California Biennial, Curated by Sarah Bancroft. County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.^[4]

The Summer Show with Kathryn Brennan Gallery. Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA.^[4]

2008: Psychology of a Pawn, curated by Mari Spirito. Participant Inc., New York, NY.^[4]

Fall Collection, Curated by Aram Mohsayedi. Kreiling & Dodd, Los Angeles, CA.^[4]

2005: Don't Accept Manana, Curated by Karola Grasslin. Kunstverein Braunschweig,Brunswick, Germany.^[39]

Curation

2008: Endless Summer, in Association with the 2008 California Biennial. Glendale College Art Gallery, Glendale, CA.^[4]

2004: Cool Intentions, Sandroni Rey, Los Angeles, CA.^[4]

References