Alex Anderson: Shape of Life

Make Room is proud to present “Shape of Life,” an exhibition that introduces Los Angeles-based artist Alex Anderson’s vision of geometry as both an aesthetic language and a metaphysical foundation. This is Anderson’s first solo exhibition with Make Room. For Anderson, geometry is not merely a formalist motif or a symbolic echo of natural recurrence. It serves as the structural armature of being. Spirals, hexagons, squares, and triangles reappear across botanical, mineral, celestial, and anatomical realms: in floral blooms, crystalline lattices, star maps, and corporeal systems.

The exhibition is anchored by two materially distinct bodies of ceramic work. One features high-fired porcelain sculptures coated in crystalline glaze. These pieces foreground transformation at a molecular level: subjected to intense heat, clay and glaze interact to generate crystalline eruptions across the surface. These formations, reminiscent of self-generating ecologies, result from the kiln’s precise thermal gradients and chemical variables, which orchestrate the unpredictable blooming of crystals—each formation a visible residue of time and transformation.

The second body includes low-fired earthenware sculptures that are chromatically saturated and iconographically dense. These works engage more overtly with narrative and painterly conventions. Anderson shifts his focus from the elemental to the imagistic, privileging surface, gesture, and visual storytelling. Though sharing a ceramic substrate with the porcelain pieces, these sculptures operate in a different register, emphasizing illustrative motifs and gestural surface treatments that foreground narrative resonance over technical display.

A conceptual throughline links both approaches: a sustained investigation into geometry as a transcultural, transhistorical sign system. Anderson’s references are diverse—Tibetan mandalas, Chinese coinage, medieval illuminated manuscripts, and especially the cosmological schematics of Hildegard von Bingen. For Anderson, these are not mere visual quotations but manifestations of a shared metaphysical inquiry—a desire to render the immaterial visible, to impose structure upon the ineffable.

The work Daisy Chain with Halo incorporates a daisy motif suspended within a misty field of blue porcelain, proposing a visual syntax that links crystalline logic with pictorial imagery. Here, the crystalline transcends decorative function to become a semiotic device—a glyph for embedded order.

Rejecting categorical divisions between object and image, the exhibition layout interweaves wall-mounted and freestanding works, reflecting Anderson’s belief in the fluidity of formats. Each sculpture operates as an independent meditation on materiality and meaning, yet collectively they form a contiguous field—a topology where surface and depth, idea and object, coalesce.

In Anderson’s cosmology, geometry is not inert. It is a dynamic vector, a site where visibility and invisibility contest and converge. Shapes mark the interface between matter and mind, formalizing forces otherwise intangible. Life, within this schema, is not a stasis but a generative process—evident in Anderson’s evolving sculptural lexicon, where geometric archetypes like the spiral and the grid reappear with variation, signaling a continuous rearticulation of form, function, and perception.