Transformations: The Cabinet Card Paintings of Alex Gross 2012 - 2019

by Alex Gross, Ron English (Introduction)

Overview

Transformations is a collection of mixed media paintings by Alex Gross. On each page, he “transforms” a vintage cabinet card photograph into a pop culture character, through painting with acrylic and oil paints. Popular superheroes and supervillains, famous musicians, science fiction and fantasy characters, movie monsters, and many more all make appearances in this book.

Alex has been building this body of work for over a decade now and it continues to grow in popularity. This book shows each image before it was painted upon, and afterwards. Showing precisely how each image was altered adds a uniquely enjoyable aspect to this art book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783943330427
Publisher:	Gingko Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/29/2019
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	10.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alex Gross lives and paints in Los Angeles. He has been an important part of the Pop Surrealist movement for over 20 years, and has exhibited his paintings across the globe. He is also a lifelong lover of superheroes, supervillains, and pop culture characters.

Preface

"Cabinet cards are larger cardboard mounted photographs made in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century, designed to display on cabinets and mantles. Alex Gross began collecting them some years back, and soon experimented with painting directly upon them, after first sealing them with acrylic. He allows the faces to speak to him and inform the transformation into kitsch archetypal mythology, at once real and dead, ordinary and extraterrestrial. And as the memento becomes an original, the object begins its new life cycle.

From Alice in Wonderland to Game of Thrones, Oompa Loompas to Avatar, these exquisite portraits straddle fantasy and history, and blur the boundaries of ephemera and immortality... These works are at once an acknowledgment of his desire to collect objects infused with meaning, and the creative desire to put his own spin on things. They embody the central artistic role of creation and destruction, of reverence and the will of the iconoclast. If these cards were “vandalized” by any other act, their value would be diminished, or destroyed. But the alchemical interaction of the artist’s hand achieves the opposite. The superimposition of cultural mythologies on the simple attempts at immortality of rather ordinary people creates a snapshot of the moment-to-moment struggle to exist as an individual in an infinite universe... His cabinet cards are his calling cards — charming, accessible art, designed to hold onto, and pass down."