Born in Milwaukee, Alexander Nolan studied at The New York Studio. We first met in Brooklyn where he was working in studios next to his artist wife Lauren Luloff.
Much of Alex’s painting technique is inspired by the collections held in the great museums of New York City. Bruegel's observations of humanity, the colour and fluidness of Matisse’s draughtsmanship, Dali’s surreal world, for instance, “The Accommodations of Desire” (whose title we have borrowed) and from Felix Vallotton's woodcuts of domestic life, with their flat open plains of colour. A palette of commercial colours, so blazed by film animators and storytellers: Tom and Jerry to The Simpsons.
His work pays homage to a great American tradition: full of a dark humour, unfinished stories of menace, salaciousness, secrecy and satire. For anyone familiar with the American cartoon- school of art, exemplified in The New Yorker, these pen and ink drawings stand out. Reminiscent of the great Charles Addams and his infamous family. Who can forget Gomez and Morticia, Uncle Fester, their butler Lurch, the youngest Pubert Addams and the macabre disembodied hand, Thing ?
In Alexander’s work we meet his mind-friends and ghouls. “I enjoy walking through my mind as if it were a forest. I pick out here and there something of interest that I feel like expressing and exploring more deeply through the act of drawing. I am not trying to find anything in particular, other than my own bliss'. Playful or suspect, desires meets the devil, mischief amuses, humour confronts us and we laugh, we smile, sometimes when we shouldn’t, we know his characters far too well, they are as familiar as they are universal.
Alexander’s work has been widely exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago and Luxembourg.
This is his first solo exhibition with Crean & Company.
- Nick Crean
For further information about each artwork, please click on the image or contact nick@creanandcompany.com
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Oils, Acrylic and Pastels
A black-humoured blend of the satirical, the surreal and the salacious, Nolan’s paintings straddle the language of dream and absurdity. Each vignette-like canvas is populated by an imaginative and memorable cast of characters: a world of candlelit dinners with skeletons, sweetly serenading devils, and violin concertos attended by cats and dogs. His work is a contemporary reminder of painting as a deeply narrative medium.
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Ink works
As reflected in these works – which span oils, acrylics, pastels watercolours and inks on paper – Nolan’s influences are broad. A graduate of art history who later trained as an artist at the MFA New York Studio School, his work is an echo of numerous styles and movements, such as the genre paintings of Old Masters and twentieth-century surrealism.
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Watercolours
In scenes that portray the hustle and bustle of life on 42nd Street, or 77th and Madison, there is a lively and now nostalgic quality to Nolan’s works – many of which were painted over the course of the lockdown. ‘It was quite a year, 2020,’ says Nolan. ‘I was truly inspired by the time. I've never made such a body of work that relates to the present time as a collective’.
