Alexis Rockman
ALEXIS ROCKMAN
New York based painter Alexis Rockman is an eco-warrior who began making art in the service of environmental awareness long before it was fashionable, embarking on expeditions to far-flung locations like Antarctica and Madagascar in the company of professional naturalists. His work tell stories in which natural histories of the past confront dystopian futures.
His work has been exhibited around the world and showcased at prestigious galleries and museums including the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Serpentine Gallery and many more. Rockman also notably worked on Life of Pi with Ang Lee. Rockman’s art served as the backbone for much of the film’s aesthetics.
For The Artist Profile Archive's film on Shipwrecks, Rockman was filmed speaking in the exhibition at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY in 2021 and was also interviewed in his Tribeca, New York City studio.
“The HMS Erebus from 1845 that was lost looking for the Northwest Passage, focuses on from the perspective of the ecology, the polar bears that were there. What happened to the humans? I started thinking about Antarctica and wanted to sort of change up my palette and geography. Well, some interesting things happened, and they just discovered some artifacts on this small island in the Arctic Circle, and they had photographs of many of these artifacts. So I built this painting around the artifacts that were in the New York Times Magazine that they have beautiful photographs of, and I sort of started to think about the local ecology and what would be a compelling scenario and just build this painting out of that.”
“The Raft of the Medusa, which is partially based on the famous painting by Géricault. I decided I was going to do a painting about what happened to the raft after the survivors were rescued and the local ecology off the coast of Senegal, where the actual event happened, unfolded. So, I looked into birds that were endemic to the coast of Senegal. I looked at what time of year the event happened, and I tried to chart what migrating birds would be where in the area, and then I looked into the species of shark that would be local to the area as well, and made a little still life based on another painting of Géricault’s of severed limbs from the Executed that I thought would be a nice reference to the cannibalism on the raft and added a little rat for flavor. So, every painting is through the lens of the history of ecology.”
“I think the world’s a fascinating, interesting place, and our place in it has some triumphal moments and some very disappointing moments that have ended in complete failure and disgrace. And what’s a more exciting way to articulate that than a shipwreck.”
