Using a complex process of layering, scratching, scraping, and even melting, Alex Merritt creates intensely worked textural paintings charged with an unsettling sense of raw emotion and psychological conflict. Merritt’s application of paint to canvas has a sculptural depth, often protruding several inches from the surface that adds a three-dimensional quality to many of his works. Often featuring isolated figures in broad, expansive landscapes, Merritt’s paintings are narratively ambiguous, radiating a sense of calmness and brooding tension simultaneously. Broadly representational backgrounds are contrasted with distorted figures, their faces often blurred beyond recognition, as if in continuous motion, perhaps screaming. A direct response to his traumatic childhood and adolescence, Merritt’s work is deeply personal, addressing his internal conflicts without flinching. Yet the art retains a restless, elusive quality, giving it a broader universal meaning while speaking to the kind of existential angst which can afflict us all without warning.
Alex Merritt (b. 1981) was born in Washington DC and currently lives and works in New York. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and later at the New York Academy of Art. In 2017 he received the Vasari Classic Artists' Oil Colour Award and in 2019 he presented his work individually for the first time in the exhibition The Stranger, at the Booth Gallery in New York. He has also participated in group exhibitions, including Disrupted Realism: Paintings for a Distracted World (2018), Stanek Gallery, USA, from which resulted an homonymous publication the following year, and P(re)view (2023), Belard Gallery, Portugal.