'Guest Room'

The SCAD Museum of Art presents "Guest Room," the first museum exhibition in the U.S. by artist Alex Gardner. In recent years, Gardner has gained widespread attention for his bold painting style. This exhibition presents a selection of Gardner’s most recent work, along with new pieces commissioned for SCAD deFINE ART.

Combining a distilled aesthetic sense, a potent narrative capacity and an assortment of emotional landscapes, Gardner’s paintings present eloquent compositions that speak beyond their two-dimensional condition. His style has been often associated with Mannerism, a 16th-century, post-High Renaissance art movement that privileged gesture over representation, and indulged a particular stylization of figure over the technical obsession of the great masters of High Renaissance. In that sense, Gardner has developed a vocabulary of elements including color tones, seemingly architectural spaces, vegetation and a series of genderless, featureless dark figures. Together, these elements are in continuous movement, affecting each other and ultimately creating cryptic narratives — which perhaps say more about who is reading them and how. Inasmuch as Gardner’s work is in clear dialogue with the history of human representation in art, it is also connotative of current conflicts about race, gender, desire and the technological mediation of the body. In addition, the titles of Gardner’s works suggest familiar places, or what appear to be character identities, boosting the hazy environment and creating new layers of questions in the already ciphered scenes.