Jadro Cultural Center, Skopje North Macedonia
July 14th to 28th 2025
This exhibition was supported by Jadro Cultural Center, Chengdu University College of Chinese and ASEAN Arts, and Popovi Winery
Alex Close’s paintings, textiles, sculptures and mixed media works take a challenging step from the taken-for-granted to the uncertain and unsettling. Almost comfortable in this disorienting state, she holds onto “a delicate figment of understanding that twists.” In her paintings, one can almost recognize things, but not quite, like in a dream or an image digitally composed of fragments. During our first discussion, one of the things that came to mind was the famous motto among anthropologists that their discipline is concerned with making ‘the strange familiar and the familiar strange’. This phrase, now common in anthropology textbooks, originates in art, particularly poetry, highlighting the close dialogue between the two disciplines throughout the years.
At different points of art history, artists have drawn attention to the painting frame, the exhibition space and eventually to the art world itself, rendering the framework visible and no longer innocent. Alex’s concern with Western privilege, which ignores the frame (of a painting or otherwise), demonstrates that such fundamental issues remain relevant today in light of post- and anti-colonial critique. The omnipresent frame, the grid, standardization, cameras and images, visual languages are all tools of spectatorship and control legitimized by (modernist) epistemologies that claim objectivity, concealing the hierarchical power structures that dominate them. However, lived experience proves that there is no fixed observer position; no grid that can fully entrap and deprive bodies and ideas of agency. Bodies are constantly perceiving, interpreting and constructing the world –bodies that produce art included.
Through her work, Alex actively explores abstraction today, decades after the dominance of abstract production in art, and the subsequent establishment and questioning of the ‘Return of the Real’. In our highly digitized and automated era, when technology enables abstraction so extensive that physical realities are often forgotten, what can manual artistic processes tell us and what effect can they have on us? What kind of painting can be relevant today?
-Text by Sofia Grigoriadou
Press:
Diva.mk: Twisting Figment: Abstract Art Exhibition by Alex Close at Jadro, Skopje