ALEX CARVER: EFFIGY
White Cube is delighted to present ‘Effigy’, Alex Carver’s first solo exhibition in Asia.
April 25 – June 14, 2025
Though these works are anchored by transhistorical social and political anxieties, for Carver, the depiction of torment is ultimately a transformative operation by which artistic convention may be prised apart and rendered anew. The title of the exhibition as well as its main conceit, an effigy is a sculptural stand-in for a political figure that is often burned in a gesture of redirected brutality. The question of sublimated violence is central to Carver’s practice; in ‘Effigy’, the depiction of burning figures becomes a means of opening avenues for creative destruction and an alternative lexicon of figural representation.
Each painting involves a multilayered process in which intricate, hand-applied techniques intermingle with the artist’s idiosyncratic source materials. For these paintings, as in many of his previous works, Carver began working on unstretched linen canvases. In addition to drawing upon a range of art-historical sources, from Medieval manuscripts to sculptures by Rodin, and Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Carver continues to incorporate imagery and diagrams sourced from the world of medicine. An ultrasound scan, for example, points to the role of contemporary imaging technologies in an analysis of the body, an idea further alluded to by translucent elements that appear as ghostly figments or objects penetrated by x-ray vision.
Instructional diagrams for medical machinery in the underpaintings, meanwhile, compositionally inform these new works. To these Carver has applied techniques including mono-printing and frottage, whereby the form of an absent object has been insinuated by direct transfer or by rubbing, as well as painterly interventions that introduce shadowy recesses, or highlights by way of bright impasto strokes. The canvas, or skin, is then stretched over a frame.
Across both new series of works in ‘Effigy’, Carver engages the limits of figural representation and aesthetic genres whose signs may be grafted into and onto the pliant, metaphorical skin of painting. Within the space of sublimation offered by artistic practice, Carver’s epic scenes of brutality reflect an anxiety-riven ‘desire to reject the centrality of the human figure, transcend it, eradicate it’. While elsewhere a biopolitical tool or social construct, the body in Carver’s purview becomes raw material for a transgressive painterly approach and sustained interrogation of ‘the ethics of representation’.