Stephen Friedman Gallery has announced the representation of Vienna-based, Franco-Senegalese artist Alexandre Diop (b. 1995, Paris, France). Diop’s practice—rooted in assemblage, painting, and sculpture—confronts questions of history, memory, and identity through the raw materiality of found objects. His works repurpose everyday detritus such as nails, rusted metal, and discarded textiles, transforming them into densely layered compositions that bridge personal narrative and collective memory.
“Alexandre is one of the most urgent and compelling voices of his generation,”
shares Stephen Friedman.
“His practice embodies both resilience and reinvention—taking fragments of the past and reconfiguring them into new forms of meaning. His ability to hold beauty and brutality in the same gesture is extraordinary, and I am thrilled to see how his practice will continue to evolve in the years to come.”
On 19th September, Stephen Friedman Gallery will open Run For Your Life !, Diop’s debut exhibition in London, and his first with the gallery. The exhibition presents a major new body of mixed-media paintings that grapple with themes of history, metaphorical archaeology, and socio-political change. In this series, Diop examines the relationship between movement and time—embodied through dance, migration, and resistance. The exhibition’s title is both a rallying cry and an invitation: to stand for change, to embrace tolerance, and to remain alert to crises shaping our world.
About the artist
Alexandre Diop is a Franco-Senegalese artist whose powerful, mixed-media works interrogate themes of ancestry, beauty, violence and social transformation. Drawing upon his experience as a dancer, musician, and visual artist, Diop brings a multidisciplinary lens to his practice, crafting works that are deeply visceral and formally innovative. Alexandre Diop was born in Paris, France in 1995. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
His rigorous approach to art making—what he terms object-images—employs found and recycled materials such as scrap metal, wood, paper, leather, plastic and textile remnants. These are sourced from scrapyards, urban streets and derelict buildings, then transformed through an intensive process of layering, burning, tearing, stapling and collaging onto wood panels. The resulting works exist at the intersection of painting, sculpture and relief. Elaborating on his choice of materials Diop says, “I always see the beauty in discarded things…these collected materials are my colour palette so to speak.”
Diop’s works also reveal a rigorous drawing practice which combine calligraphic lines, symbols and images that are painted, drawn and sprayed. Figures—often human or animal—emerge in theatrical, textured compositions, where remnants of packaging, colour or branding allude to histories of consumption, displacement and resistance. His material language, while firmly rooted in personal and political narrative, also engages with broader art-historical lineages. His work draws from movements such as Dada, Art Brut, Expressionism and the Viennese Secession, while maintaining a strong dialogue with both West African aesthetic traditions and the visual codes of contemporary urban culture.
Diop has garnered significant international attention through a string of major institutional exhibitions. In 2023, Diop’s work was imaginatively contextualised with 18th-century anatomical wax models of bodies and body parts in Anatomie at Josphinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria. His residency at the Rubell Museum in Miami culminated in a touring exhibition, ‘Jooba Jubba, l’Art du Défi, the Art of Challenge’, shown in Miami (2022) and Washington DC (2023). In 2022, Diop exhibited alongside Kehinde Wiley in ‘La Prochaine Fois, Le Feu’, presented by Reiffers Art Initiatives in Paris.
Notable group exhibitions include ‘Les Apparitions’, Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France (2025); ‘De Sculptura’, Albertina Klosterneuburg, Austria (2025); ‘The Beauty of Diversity’, Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2024); ‘Being Mortal’, Dom Museum, Vienna, Austria (2023); ‘The New African Portraiture’, Shariat Collections, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria (2022); and ‘Le Mouton Noir’, Gesso Art Space, Vienna, Austria (2021).
Diop’s works can be found in the collections of Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; AMA Venezia, Venice, Italy; AMOCA, Cardiff, Wales, UK; Espacio Tacuarí, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Josephinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria; Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC, USA; MB Collection, Germany; Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France; Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida and Washington DC, USA; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping, Sweden; Stora Wäsby Public Collection, Stockholm, Sweden and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA. s
