The Knot

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present The Knot, the third one-person exhibition by Alex Carver at the gallery. Across 12 paintings, Carver reaffirms his commitment to the use of frottage, monoprinting and deliberate brushwork as means to achieve complex surfaces and spatial conditions for painting. These varied techniques deliberately confound traditional dichotomies such as inside and outside or body and world. As a central motif, the knot appears both as a discrete visual icon and as a broader compositional and visual disposition towards the painted image. Carver plays with the inherent contradictions and connotations of the knot as both a material entanglement and as a pure conceptual object which both convolutes and binds, as much as it clarifies and tethers. To produce his works, the artist often begins by making a series of low-relief, frieze-like sculptures which he then places behind unstretched canvas attached to his studio wall. In doing so, Carver is able to make frottaged imagery with large plaster knives by moving oil paint over the surface of the canvas, leaving an indexical trace of the object embedded in oil. This process constitutes a provisional and painterly approach that can evoke more advanced imaging technologies such as scans, X-rays, and ultrasound without merely illustrating them. Following Carver's ongoing fixation with biomedical source material and the medieval body, the reliefs produced for this exhibition were inspired by early anatomical studies, a CT scan of a fallen climber as well as an icon from medical history, Wound Man. Throughout the show, these various impressions received by the canvas emerge from and recede back into an undulating membrane of visual information, which insists on the ecstatic and vibratory possibilities of painting. Here, figure and ground exist as coordinates in the pictorial field but are largely bypassed in pursuit of everything between them. Alex Carver (b. 1984, Boise, Idaho) lives and works in Boise. He earned an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from the Cooper Union. His second solo exhibition with Miguel Abreu Gallery, Engineer Sacrifice, was held in the fall of 2022. In 2021, Carver’s work was featured in Potent Stem, his second solo exhibition at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, as well as Our Other Us, the 4th Art Encounters Biennial in Timisoara, Romania, curated by Mihnea Mircan and Kasia Redzisz. He had his first solo show, External Fixation, at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, in 2019. In 2018, Carver participated in the collaborative two-part painting show, Bubble Revision, Miguel Abreu Gallery, and Call Out Tools, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, with Avery Singer and Pieter Schoolwerth. His debut solo exhibition, Cell, was held at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in 2018. Carver’s collaborative feature film with Daniel Schmidt, The Unity of All Things, was presented at the 2013 Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland. Other film works have been shown in international venues and festivals such as Tate Modern (London, 2014), Berlinale (2015), and the Vancouver International Film Festival (2013), among others. Effigy was on view at White Cube, Seoul in 2025. In 2024, Carver had his third one-person exhibition, Expanded Skin, at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. A Desired Mesh was held at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, as part of Art Basel Parcours in 2023. His work is held in the collections of the Stavanger Art Museum, Norway; the Pinault Collection, Paris; the Ringier Collection, Zurich; the Kistefos Museum, Norway; the Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany; and the Gome Art Foundation, Hong Kong, among others.

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