ALEX DA CORTE: THE DÆMON
1062 N Orange Grove Ave
West Hollywood, CA 90046
Digital print on poplin, plexiglass, Flashe paint, sequin pins, foam, velvet, hardware, wood frame
88¾ × 117⅜ × 3 inches; 225 × 298 × 8 cm
Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Alex Da Corte: THE DÆMON, the next exhibition in his gallery at 1062 North Orange Grove. The artist’s first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles in seven years, it consists of an immersive installation featuring new paintings and sculptures.
With a focus on the idea of the home and domesticity, Da Corte has transformed the gallery to evoke a 1960s modern interior. At the installation’s center, a carpeted conversation pit features upholstered sculptures of furniture, lighting, and design objects, which reference iconic mid-century design as well as futuristic furniture seen in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.
The titular work of the show, The Dæmon (2023), is a painting in twenty-four parts based on diagrams included in Terence Conran’s 1974 publication The House Book, here reimagined to include a cat traveling through a house. Several panels depict lamps toppled by the cat, echoing a nearby sculpture of a knocked-over house plant. In another room, a stained-glass window and a neon light shine on an oversized sculpture of a cigarette resting on a mirrored mosaic table. In the words of the artist, “I’ve always wanted to remix objects and recycle them in ways where what they’re representing is not static, it’s constantly in flux.”
Alex Da Corte: THE DÆMON is accompanied by a book designed by the artist and featuring an essay by Sabrina Tarasoff.
Alex Da Corte (b. 1980) was born in Camden, New Jersey, and lives and works in Philadelphia. His work has been the subject of one-person museum exhibitions at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan (2023); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark (2022); the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2021); the Prada Foundation in Shanghai (2020); the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne (2018); the Secession in Vienna (2017); and MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (2016).