Exhibitions

Alexander Cheves: The pull, tops, where keys, our wallet zig zags

1 Novemeber – 15 December 2019

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Opening Reception Friday, 1 November from 6 – 10 pm

Marginal Utility is proud to present The pull, tops, where keys, our wallet zig zags a solo exhibition by Oakland California based artist Alexander Cheves.

Alexander Cheves’s work explores the relationships between shape and color in paintings and sculptures that are directly informed by landscape experience: space, sky, horizon, vista, architecture and perspective. Using paint, wood, paper, plaster, concrete, steel and other building materials, Cheves’s mines the contrast between bold colors, scale, and composition to encourage the observer towards an awareness of place and personal narrative, as well as imply aesthetic relationships between human-made, industrial structures and the landscape that absorbs them. Cheves’s explores this threshold where time and landscape co-mingle, taking a consistent cast of characters of iconic human-made and natural shapes—swimming pools, farm houses, apartment buildings, corner stores, sky-scrapers, highways, the occasional empty field and open sky—a step closer to fantastic abstraction. Quasi-recognizable sculptural figures cast impossible shadows; enthusiastic color fields flirt with the edges of their canvases and pedestals; previous dialogues between forms are masked but still visible beneath layers of paint; all to an end that suggests a grand conversation within and between individual works, betraying their otherwise minimal facade.