Alex Da Corte: Fresh Hell

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa is holding the exhibition Alex Da Corte: Fresh Hell.

Today, life’s every nook and cranny is saturated with visually appealing images. Creators and inventors are constantly thinking about what kinds of images operate on the human psyche and how to visualize the things that normally go unseen: emotions, time, and space.

Alex Da Corte is an artist known for works that play with objects and icons that feel familiar to him, deconstructing and reconstructing their original meanings. He draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including popular and consumer culture, art history and design, sampling the visual culture of America through a variety of media including video, sculpture, painting, and installation. In all of his methods, Da Corte’s attention to vivid color and form is evident, and familiar motifs become dense, graceful assemblages thanks to his extensive knowledge of art history and his subtle and distinctive sensibility. While these works have an allure that draws people in, they also appeal to inexpressible human emotions such as loneliness and anxiety, making people dance in a strange, delusional world outside of the realm of rational organization.

This is the first exhibition for Alex Da Corte at an art museum in Asia, and will feature a total of 11 video installations and other works, including recent and never-before-seen pieces. The varied images projected on an overwhelmingly large box-shaped screen frequently appear light, coquettish, and funny, but they also possess a consistently mysterious appeal that plays havoc with one’s mind the more deeply one engages with them. Fresh Hell also ventures into the relationship between desire, memory, and perception that has come to define consumer culture in a contemporary society faced with an onslaught of visual information, confronting us with the question of what this inundation of images brings about.

Chief Curator: Hiromi Kurosawa

Alex Da Corte
Born in Camden, New Jersey in 1980 and lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US. Da Corte is a Venezuelan-American artist. His work was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial in New York, the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 2018 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Past one-person exhibitions include the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Secession in Vienna, MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. Da Corte was selected for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Mr. Remember, a solo survey exhibition spanning 20 years of work, opened at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark in 2022.

Curated by Hiromi Kurosawa, Yumiko Nonaka
Organized by 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Kanazawa Art Promotion and Development Foundation)
Supported by U.S. Consulate General Osaka-Kobe, THE HOKKOKU SHIMBUN
In Corporation with Tama Art University (Information Design, Art and Media Course), Kawasaki City Museum, Hyatt Centric Kanazawa, MODERNIS & COMPANY, Inc.