— Alex Carver
Working in both painting and film, Carver constructs intricate discursive systems that fuse diagrammatic planning, historical artifacts, natural detritus, and appropriated text, all contained within the picture plane to produce skeins of critical inquiry. Through his layering of machine stenciled screens, frottage and brush work, and the combining of scientific precision with the fantastical, Carver’s paintings develop an elusive world of imagery in which dense layers are splintered with negative images, like a vectorized labyrinth, set against a sweeping gesso ground that gathers and binds together the painting’s diverse materials. The worlds that emerge through Carver’s work suggest an uncanny reflection of our own, as though peering through frictional, over-engineered realities that distort rather than cohere. In his paintings, densely textured overlays of different forms of image production seem to oscillate, phase, and emerge at the direction of the eye, generating the sensation of one realm of information becoming visible only by way of another.
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Alex Carver (b. 1984, Boise, Idaho) lives and works in Boise. He earned an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from the Cooper Union. Recent solo exhibitions dedicated to his work have been held at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2026, 2022, 2019), White Cube, Seoul (2025), and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2024, 2021, 2018), among others. In 2023, A Desired Mesh was held at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, as part of Art Basel Parcours. His work has been featured in group shows including Ugly Painting, Nahmad Contemporary, curated by Dean Kissick and Eleanor Cayre (2023), Our Other Us, the 4th Art Encounters Biennial in Timisoara, Romania, curated by Mihnea Mircan and Kasia Redzisz (2021), and a collaborative two-part painting show, Bubble Revision, Miguel Abreu Gallery, and Call Out Tools, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, with Avery Singer and Pieter Schoolwerth (2018). Carver’s collaborative feature film with Daniel Schmidt, The Unity of All Things, was presented at the 2013 Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland. Other film works have been shown in international venues and festivals such as Tate Modern (London, 2014), Berlinale (2015), and the Vancouver International Film Festival (2013), among others.
Carver’s work is held in the collections of the Stavanger Art Museum, Norway; the Pinault Collection, Paris; the Ringier Collection, Zurich; the Kistefos Museum, Norway; the Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany; and the GOME Art Foundation, Hong Kong, among others.
