Alexander Gorlizki

The idea of the artist’s studio as a physical manifestation of the artist’s brain, as revealed so beautifully in Ben Stockley’s film portrait of David Austen last Friday, brings to mind another artist who favours a collage-like approach to making work across many mediums. Like David, Alex Gorlizki gathers ideas across, sculpture, film, painting, and textiles – but always returns to the exquisite works on paper that form the bedrock of his practice.

Alex’s studio in Brooklyn is another treasure trove of discovery, a bizarre bazaar of accumulated wonders, where his own works mix with collections of objects and drawings from around the world, and in particular from Jaipur where, 20 years ago, he established a workshop with the master miniature painter Riyaz Uddin. Ever since he has continued to develop a new language that finds fertile ground in the diversity of contradictory cultures.

The walls of his studio are covered in cork boards which gather hundreds of drawings and fragments, both ancient and modern, pinned and interleaved and covering the breadth of Alex’s interests from Tantric cosmology, ornamental topiary, popular culture, minimal abstraction and biomorphic symbolism to the shapes and sizes of plumbing parts. Back in 2017 Alex allowed us to transplant one of these mind-scrambling, sensory feasts to the gallery - an image of which appears here as part 56 of ‘the Unseen Masterpiece’