16 Mar 2015

Alexa Meade's exhibition at the Sisso gallery

Sisso Gallery is hosting Alexa Meade's first French exhibition and is organizing in house performances during the first two weeks of the event. The artist's original and modern portraits lie halfway between body painting and the trompe l'œil technique.

Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade was born in Washington DC in 1986. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in political science, she immediately became interested in creating art, with painting as a medium. As a self taught artist, she first tried to capture the shadows cast on grass plots and trees, covering them with paint. Going beyond flat surfaces, her experiments later focused on the use of shapes and spaces. Her fascination with illusions and light quickly lead her to develop a portrait technique where she directly applies paint on people and the objects surrounding them. She then uses photography to capture these ephemeral installations and transforms the depth of a real scene into an image in two dimensions. Her portraits are filled with optical illusions and reverse the process of trompe l'oeil, dancing on a thin line between 2D and 3D.

'The genre of portrait has been around for about 3000 years, this is not an easy one to renew' said Magdalena Sawon, owner of PostMaster Gallery in New York, where she invited Alexa Meade to exhibit her work, which she described as 'a valid and very interesting contribution to the portrait genre'.

Alexa is an internationally renowned artist, exhibiting in major museums alongside Andy Warhol, Banksy or Shepard Fairey. Her 2013 TED conference 'Your Body is my Canvas' is a great success with over two million views.

She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Your Body is my Canvas

The Sisso gallery invites you to discover the unsettling world of Alexa Meade. The artist forgets about canvas to concentrate her work on the human body whose shapes and possibility fascinates her. Her technic consists in reversing the classical codes and painting portraits directly on the skin of her models. Their faces are painted like a mask at their own image and then photographed for a most surprising result, merging the portrait and its subject.

Alexa Meade masters the art of illusion and gives figures in three dimensions an original two-dimensional appearance. Along the years, several photographic series were carried out: in public places to highlight the gap between the painted subject and reality, but also in painted backgrounds to create a painting anchored in reality. In 2012, she pushes the process a step further with Sheila Vand who she previously painted and then dipped in a milk bath to analyze the graphic effects of the encounter between the two materials.

The Sisso gallery gives you the opportunity to live the most unique experience by becoming Alexa Meade's model. Portrait sessions will be organized exclusively by appointment in our space from March 20 to 30. A photographic print signed by the artist and sized from 50 to 80 cm will be handed after the performance.