Walls and Bridges
Walls and Bridges is a 10-day series of performances and critical explorations uniting French and American thinkers and artists from social sciences, philosophy, literature and live arts.
Alexis Rockman
Alexis Rockman © Dorothy Spears
ARTIST
United States
Biography
Alexis Rockman, born in 1962. He is an American contemporary artist known for his paintings that provide rich depictions of future landscapes as they might exist with impacts of climate change and evolution influenced by genetic engineering. He has exhibited his work in the United States since 1985, including in 2004 an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and internationally
since 1989. Alexis Rockman lives in New York City, and works out of a studio in the city’s TriBeCa neighborhood. He has been depicting the natural world with virtuosity and wit for more than two decades. He was one of the first contemporary artists to build his career around exploring environmental issues, from evolutionary biology and genetic engineering to deforestation and climate change. Rockman has garnered attention for embracing these issues, as well as for the epic quality of his projects, including several monumentally scaled canvases. His work expresses deep concerns about the world’s fragile ecosystems and the tension between nature and culture, which are communicated through vivid, even apocalyptic, imagery. Rockman achieves his vision through a synthesis of fantasy and empirical fact, using sources as varied as natural history, botanical illustrations, museum dioramas, science
fiction films, realist art traditions dating back to the Renaissance, and firsthand field study.
