In a world where most of us can’t go even a few minutes without our phones (just look at people stuck in traffic and the dangerous scrolling they do while driving!), the paintings of Alex Gross offer a poignant reminder of our dependence on technology and the isolation that comes with being “connected” all the time. Much of Gross’s art is filled with melancholy as his contemplative subjects stare into the void or down at their phones (which really is another form of a void, as these black mirrors seem to bring their owners no pleasure).
The result is a beautiful mix of surreal imagery imbued with aching loneliness. The paintings feel modern and current, and Gross’s new show at Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery — which runs until March 25th — is one of the artist’s strongest collections to date. I recently had the pleasure to talk to Gross about his new show and the inspiration he found in our every day inability to connect to the people around us.
What were some of your major inspirations for this collection?
Honestly, it’s just the world around me, observing people, particularly in Los Angeles. That’s my biggest inspiration. I have so many paintings with people either engaged with their phones or just not fully present or paying attention. That seems to be a daily reality when I go out. If I go to the supermarket or to a restaurant, that’s what I see everywhere — all the time. I think all of us are just used to it now, but I feel acutely aware, when I go to Whole Foods, of the fact that no one is really paying attention.
I noticed in this collection, that while you’ve done quite a bit of surreal work, you have several pieces that are a little more realistic. What about this time in your life inspired you go with some more realistic scenes?
I’ve noticed that myself. I’ve definitely been going more realistic and a little bit less surrealistic for the last two or three years. I had a son a little over two years ago, and so my working time and my working process definitely got altered by his existence in the world, and I found myself trying to streamline the process. I didn’t have as much time to get super busy with ideas and make them more surreal. I think, when you have a lot of time, it’s easy to start doing so much with them that the surrealism starts to creep in more and more, but when I didn’t have as much time, they get a little bit less surreal and a little more photo-real.
I think it’s also just my taste. I like doing realistic work. It’s not that I don’t like doing surrealistic work, but sometimes, I feel like less is more as I get older.
This is your first show back in Los Angeles in a decade! Looking back to that first show in L.A., how have you changed as an artist?
The work is totally different now. When I started showing in galleries in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I was only just beginning to do my own personal work. Stylistically, it was all over the place. It was much more influenced by Japanese things, and there was much more typography and graphics involved too, so yeah, my work has changed a lot since I first started showing here.
My early work was also Victorian, so I think the evolution went from looking more Victorian and old-fashioned to looking more modern and contemporary and also the surrealism morphing into a little less surrealism and a little more realism.
Many of your pieces have an undercurrent of pessimism or sadness. Do you generally feel pessimistic about the state of the world or do you feel hopeful as you create in your paintings?
I don’t know if I should answer that! If I say I feel hopeful and there’s somebody who connects with my work because they’re really pessimistic, I don’t want them to feel like, “Oh, no, he’s not on my same thought plane” or vice versa. You know? I think I would just say let the work speak for itself. If you think my worldview is hopeful from the work, then that’s a legitimate interpretation. If you think it’s pessimistic, I think that’s legitimate too.
Probably, like most of us, it depends on what day of the week you ask me.
Was there a piece in this collection that was particularly fun to do?
I have a lot of favorites in this show. There are a couple of pieces that I particularly like and wouldn’t mind keeping in my home forever — there’s one called “Yesterday.” And the other one I like a lot is called “Monogatari,” which is a Japanese word that just means a story. I like that piece a lot. I actually did an illustration around 10 years ago that was a similar image of a geisha on a lion in a different style, but it was something that for many years I kept around and I kept trying to play with. I kept trying to do a more modern, realistic version for myself because I liked it so much. I kind of feel like that painting is a little bit of an outlier in this show because I guess you could say it’s a little surreal, but it really just looks sort of like a fairytale image.
I like that piece. It feels kind of charming to me, which maybe it’s silly to say, since I painted it, but yeah, I like it. I feel like it is maybe less … It’s just a simple, sweet piece to me.
I know your son is really little. Does he like to look at your art?
Yeah. When I finish a painting, it usually hangs on the wall somewhere in our house until it’s ready to go to the gallery, so he’s pretty much grown up for the last two years looking at different paintings in my studio, and then they go up around the house and then suddenly, they’re all gone because I took them to the gallery. He loves to point out things. Yeah, it’ll be very interesting to see his reaction to seeing my paintings again in the gallery space, somewhere outside of the home.
You have cabinet card paintings in this show and those go with more pop culture themes. What kind of things in pop culture did you draw in this time around?
I did a David Bowie, a Ziggy Stardust cabinet card, which is really fun. I did a Netflix Daredevil cabinet card. I did a couple of Suicide Squad characters, Harley Quinn and the Joker, a Jared-Leto-style Joker. What else? I did a Django from Django Unchained. I did some Kill Bill characters.
Yeah, pretty much all TV and film-related characters, not necessarily from films that came out this year, like Django’s already a few years old, and Kill Bill’s much older, but stuff that everyone knows and a lot of people like.
Do you have a philosophy as an artist that you follow as you create works and as you paint?
I don’t have one particular philosophy. I try to evolve as I go. I try not to get stuck in one place. I think we’ve all seen a few artists who we really liked at one point and who seem to stay there and repeat themselves show after show, and some are quite successful doing that.
Although I do like success, ultimately, I want to feel like I’m growing and my work is evolving as I keep doing this, which doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes do a piece of it stylistically or thematically-related to an older work. I still do that too, but I don’t want a particular show to look just like the last show. I guess that’s ultimately my overriding concern, if you want to call it a philosophy, perhaps.
You can see Alex Gross’ work on display now at the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles.
