Long Beach Museum of Art
2300 E Ocean Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90803

We are proud to announce that Alex Gardner has debuted his first solo museum exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

The Long Beach Museum of Art presents We All Exist Right Now, the first solo museum exhibition by the young Long Beach painter Alex Gardner. In recent years, Gardner has gained widespread attention for his bold painting style. This debut exhibition presents a selection of Gardner’s most recent work, along with new pieces commissioned for the Long Beach Museum of Art. Gardner has caught a lot of attention with his expressive figurative work set in a minimal geometric landscape. The scale and figurative expression of Gardner’s works allude to those of the Mannerists in the sixteenth century characterized by artificiality, elegance, and aesthetic manipulation of the human figure. Working in acrylic, Gardner’s tightly knit compositions feature disjointed figures in intense and memorable scenes of everyday life. Skillfully painted with an essence of romance, the art of Alex Gardner relies solely on the human figure and its interaction with simple shapes to create ambiguous narratives. The aim of his work is to convey the mood and emotion of a specific life event without explicitly describing the event itself. “I want the viewers to make a connection with the work and have a visceral response—whether it be recalling the past, being reminded of the future, or appreciating the present,” says Gardner. “The goal is to get the person to think at all; to simply be moved.”

Identity is a central theme for the artist. Gardner’s characters are ageless, faceless, and genderless and embody everyone as much as no one. He uses body language from his subjects to evoke tension and the vibrant yet softly colored backgrounds ease the drama to engage a dual narrative for the viewer to decipher. Gardner applies casual titles to his work, such as Daddy Sam Don’t Care and Leaving Summer in Separate Cars to bring the day-to-day moments that inform the work to the forefront. Gardner composes his artworks in acrylics on either linen or wood panels, which is a new development in recent paintings. He has also taken an exciting departure from his all-black figures and introduced a new, all-blue color palette as well as a red-tone palette blended with black and grey. Gardner understands the importance of staying fresh and authentic, which is why his work continues to be impressive if not only for its aesthetic allure but also for its depth of storytelling and message of identity.

Alex Gardner (b. 1987, Long Beach) lives and works in Long Beach, California. He holds a BFA from California State University Long Beach, which he completed in 2011. Since then, he has shown in Copenhagen, Mexico, Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles and New York with solo exhibitions at The Hole in New York, New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles, and the König Gallery in Berlin. His work is included in the public collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami and X Museum in Beijing.