Aspen Art Museum

Wave

2024

Acrylic on fiberglass

48 × 48 in   |   121.9 × 121.9 cm

Kindly donated by the artist and Gagosian

Estimate: $120,000–$150,000

About this Work

I’m not really a surfer but I often think about my approach as related to surfing: I’m on a wave, and I either go with it or I don’t. In some ways, I find it interesting to let myself go with it, to see where it goes and to see how it works. Maybe that gives me the energy or the fuel to be able to carve into it, or to do tricks on it, or to change things up without fighting it.

   —Alex Israel

About the Artist

Alex Israel explores and embraces pop culture as a global visual language. Deeply entwined with his hometown of Los Angeles, he traffics in the detritus of Hollywood film production—backdrops, sets, and props—while also inhabiting the roles of filmmaker, talk-show host, designer, and hologram. Israel’s art practice doubles as a brand, centered around a Southern Californian millennial lifestyle for which his iconic profile-in-shades Self-Portrait functions as a logo, mobilized across high-visibility platforms in the worlds of art, entertainment, fashion, and tech. Embedded within each of Israel’s endeavors are not only a landscape (of LA) and a portrait (of himself), but a savvy meditation on a world fueled by celebrity, product placement, and online influence.

Israel received a BA from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2003, and an MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 2010. The following year, he began producing works at the Warner Bros. Design Studio in Burbank, California. These include Flats, a series of shaped panels airbrushed to suggest the distinctive gradients of LA sunsets, and Sky Backdrops, ethereal canvases depicting cloudy skies streaked with pink, blue, and orange. These series were born out of the set of As It Lays, a DIY talk show in which a deadpan Israel interviews celebrities about their everyday lives and routines as a form of portraiture. Israel’s Self-Portrait series began life as the show’s Hitchcock-inspired logo, evolving into color-block paintings on fiberglass panels, and ultimately into larger photorealistic paintings that feature the LA landscape, reflections on its culture industry, and clues to the artist’s process.

In 2016 and 2017, Israel’s collaboration with novelist Bret Easton Ellis resulted in two exhibitions of text paintings. Artist and author share a fascination with LA as both background and subject, and in their coproduced works reflect on the city’s mythos by setting Ellis’s short texts against Israel’s stock backdrops. Occupying the spaces of pop culture and media, Israel’s collaborations with Ellis, Louis Vuitton, Rimowa, and Snapchat—along with his own Infrathin Apparel clothing line and his embrace of mass platforms such as Netflix and YouTube—allow his work to engage directly with the mainstream, to glide across surfaces, from limited-edition consumer products to teenagers’ smartphone screens, moving through our thoughts, algorithms, and clouds.

How to Bid

All lots will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum from July 17 through August 1.

Bidding on this work takes place at the ArtCrush gala on Friday, August 2nd, at 8pm MT. Absentee and telephone bidding available.

Please contact bid@aspenartmuseum.org for more information, including a condition report.

In the Live Auction, there is no Buyer’s Premium and the difference between the mid-estimate and the winning bid is a tax deductible donation to the museum.

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