Alex Blau

Region: South

Website: http://alexblau.com

City / State: Nashville, TN

I use paint to build joyously compromised structures that merge the dualities of the natural/artificial and the personal/public. My vision follows my experience of the world. I am inspired by the use of color and patterns that instill desire and connection for the individual and society. I farm for my abstractions, from the patterns used in advertising and the packaging of foods people crave—like candy and snack foods—to the patterns that flow across the details of our everyday experience, like signs, floor tiles, scaffolding, and flowers. Their intricate surfaces recall the hallucinatory sweetness of candy packaging and the natural beauty of flowers and historical decorative motifs like quilting and Islamic tile. I delight in the unexpected mix of these associations when making these works. By incorporating these varying graphic languages, my work both points to abstraction’s open-ended possibility and highlights its incorporation into mass culture.