On Alexis Rockman's darkly surreal vision of the collisions between civilization and nature
With a career spanning over three decades, internationally acclaimed American artist Alexis Rockman is well known for his complex, large-scale paintings and works on paper depicting the collision between civilization and nature. Rockman synthesizes elements of human history, natural science, landscape painting, art history and science fiction with passionate interest in climate change and globalization, to create images that reveal our world balancing on the precipice.
Alexis Rockman: Works on Paper is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s graphic work, documenting his extraordinary accomplishments as a draftsman through a meticulous selection of watercolors, gouaches, oil drawings and field studies. Designed by Tony Morgan in close collaboration with the artist, the book reproduces over 150 works, many of which have never before been published. Included here are his earliest watercolors from the 1980s, often of hybrid and mutated animals; the Field Drawings, created in Guyana and other locations from mud sourced on-site; the ominously beautiful and apocalyptic Weather Drawings; painterly works relating to his epic The Great Lakes Cycle; Wallace’s Line, a visual investigation of the life of scientist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace; and Lost at Sea, his most recent body of work focused on shipwrecks. The book includes newly commissioned essays by Helen Molesworth and David Rimanelli. In addition, it includes a visual appendix of Rockman's graphic influences, with commentary by the artist.
Born in 1962 in New York, where he lives and works, Alexis Rockman has had solo museum exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts (both 2004), the Rhode Island School of Design (2005), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2010), the Drawing Center (2013) and the Grand Rapids Art Museum (2018).