Alex Da Corte’s upcoming solo exhibition, Helter Shelter or: The Red Show! or…, opens at Sadie Coles HQ this Saturday 31st October 2020, 11am-6pm.
Da Corte’s first exhibition at Sadie Coles will feature a new body of large-scale paintings and sculpture. Rendered in a crisp graphic aesthetic, the works develop upon the artist’s enduring interest in high- and low-brow popular culture, in particular pre-digital animation. The works in the series draw upon sources as wide-ranging as Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, to theorisations of seeing in art history and cinema. Painted in reverse on Plexiglass, the painting technique self-reflexively references animated imagery – for the larger part of the twentieth century painted acetate frames were the most common method of making cartoons. Often carried out by highly-skilled, yet unseen female workers, Da Corte draws attention in these works to the invisible labour essential to much-loved icons of culture and systems of their production.
Alex Da Corte Helter Shelter or: The Red Show! or… Sadie Coles HQ, 62 Kingly Street, London W1 31st October – 12th December 2020
Preview day: 31st October 2020, 11am-6pm
About the Artist
Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1980. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art. Da Corte was most recently included in La Biennale di Venezia 2019, the international exhibition May You Live in Interesting Times curated by Ralph Rugoff; as well as the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. His most recent solo exhibition was held at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln, Germany (2018). Other recent solo exhibitions include Karma, New York (2018); Secession, Vienna, Austria; Art + Practice, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2016); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2015); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014, together with Jayson Musson).
