Alex Hubbard

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About Alex Hubbard

Alex Hubbard is a New York based artist who works in painting and video. The use of the two media – in itself an unusual combination - is, for him, inextricably linked.

Alex Hubbard is a New York based artist who works in painting and video. The use of the two media – in itself an unusual combination - is, for him, inextricably linked. Hubbard’s videos take the question of how the mark in abstract painting might act as an index of a performative moment and turn it on its head, using the process and practice of painting as an allegory of the everyday. Where their relationship to painting is the most apparent, these films record the manipulation of objects on a flat plane, which, close cropped and shot from above, then becomes the vehicle for paint. At other times they are placed onto what appears to be a painted surface, into which they sink and disappear, revealing the ground as simply liquid paint. In other works again the frame is deeper and the assemblage more sculptural. Perhaps the best known, Annotated Plans for an Evacuation shown in the Whitney Biennial in 2010, documents the transformation of an old Ford Tempo, shot in profile, into a purely flat picture plane, complete with white-out windows and cut-out background. The transformation complete, the artists gets into the car and drives it away, at which point the laws of physics take over, image returns to object, and the whole thing falls apart. In counterpoint to the videos, Hubbard’s paintings often suggest a mechanical means of production. Fields of colour in fibreglass and resin are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint. Their surfaces may be stencilled, trowelled or silkscreened – the anti-hierarchical choice of technique parallels the diy aesthetic of the video works. And through this deconstruction every traditional opposition of the formal language of painting is opened up: figure and ground, material and illusionistic depth, the horizontality of production and the verticality of display. Alex Hubbard (b. 1975, Newport, Oregon) completed his degrees at Northwest College of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Recent exhibitions include "2010 – The Whitney Biennial", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, "Greater New York", PS1 MoMA, New York; "Death Never Sleeps", The Kitchen, New York; "Bingo, wait a minute", Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; “The Indiscipline of Painting”, Tate St Ives.

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