Alexander Kritselis

All the exhibitions below are available to ship and install; details about each show, including ancillary promotional materials, are itemized below.                                              

For more information:  alekos@ix.netcom.com  

MOAH “SAGES” Exhibition

Museum of Art and History Lancaster - Los Angeles, 2023. Curated by Betty Brown.

Using small pre-existing or “found” objects, such as plastic figures and model buildings to assemble resonant tableaus, Kritselis places them in combination with his drawings and paintings to create unexpected dialogues and meanings. For SAGES, Alex Kristelis’s poetic and unexpected combinations of images and objects uses three dimensional space, representing past, present and future, illustrating the tenets behind his concept of BLOCKTIME: Spooky Actions At A Distance.

SAGES is comprised of a 40’ x 10’ x 7’ installation, including charcoal, acrylic on paper, laminated carved wood, assorted bronze and plastic objects from the DECSENDENT DIALOGUES series, neon and electric lights.

MOAH “THE ROBOT SHOW” Exhibition

Museum of Art and History Lancaster - Aug/Sept 2019. Curated by Andi Campognone and Robert Benitez.

Alex Kritselis’ art is greatly influenced by Greece. He integrates classical rendering technics with digital, video, neon and other contemporary modalities. His art reflects on the individual and collective memory, as well as the friction of values past, present and future in our pursuit of self-determination and self-knowledge. The art he makes resemble fragmented pieces of memories and personal and collective histories. Traditional narratives and modern communications are woven together and “pixilated” into individual panels of wood and metal. Painted, printed or engraved they are in and of themselves complete works of art – free floating thoughts, symbols, and impressions. When assembled they embody the fragmentation of time and memory in History and mythology.

THE ROBOT SHOW is comprised of eight exhibitions exploring the place robots, and other forms of artificial intelligence, have in a contemporary social landscape – from popular culture to nature and spirituality. The Robot Show showcases the solo exhibitions of Jeff Soto, Patrick McGilligan, Robert Nelson and Karen Hochman Brown, with site specific installations by artists Cristopher Cichocki, Alexander Kritselis, and Chenhung Chen.

“The Robot Show - Preditor/Prey, Acrylic paint on 305 wood and metal panels with neon, 37’ x 6’ x 6" 

PAINTINGS OF GLOW AND SORROW / People, Places, and Travelers

Excerpt from Ariadni A. Liokatis’s catalog essay, Los Angeles, 2017:

The Glow and Sorrow body of work is a humanistic tale that exposes the artist’s profound engagement with the human experience, the extension of his personal sensibility with its strata of registers informed by the heritage of the millennial historical and cultural legacy of Ancient Greece, and the resonance of the tumultuous historical vicissitudes of Greek modern times. It reveals a unifying strand of humanism in a gradually shrinking world, a trans-historical and trans-national ethos that espouses the affirmation of the human spirit and shared humanity. The duality of light and blood epitomizes what it is to be truly human. 

Throughout his career, Kritselis’ conceptual painting and video work have re-examined myth, the persistence of memory, and the relationship between traditional storytelling and contemporary media distribution strategies, and one’s ability to create meaning out of fragmented narratives. The artist’s mixed media site-specific installations, often immersive in nature, deconstructed and explored the dynamic relationships between the historical record and contemporary interpretations of storytelling and emblematic ancient mythos. 

Through his artistic practice, multidisciplinary in content and form, Kritselis expresses a consciousness, an ethos in continuity with those all-encompassing ideals echoing the past, in search of a greater awareness of knowledge. 

A Groundspace Gallery project - Feb/Mar 2017 - Curated by Susan Joseph . Up to 16 paintings on paper. Exhibition catalog available. Ships from Los Angeles, CA.

TRANSMISSIONS / PROMETHEUS DECONSTRUCTED

In the installation Transmissions / Prometheus Deconstructed the myth of Prometheus was divided into two large format paintings facing each other and separated by four video screen presenting different conditions of life’s principle elements. 

Long Beach City College Art Gallery -  Feb/Mar 2014  -  Curated by   Habib Zamani. Acrylic on wood + metal panels + 4 video screens - 120 panels and 4 monitor. Crated and ships from Los Angeles, CA.
Video monitor detail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRhrlGURdcY

Artist Talk with Habib Zamani:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zOCI1swhLA

THE TEMPLE OF MYTH AND ENCODED HISTORIES

An interactive space designed to explore themes of encoded histories and the deconstruction of ancient myths for an exhibition of international artists at the USC Fischer Museum of Art in the fall of 2016. Curated by Adriani Liokatis.

This immersive installation is comprised of 480 individually painted metal and wood panels and a number of imbedded video moving images. The nature of the installation allows the individual elements to be organized again and again over a number of different formations depending on the configuration of the exhibition space.  

IMPERIAL EDEN / AFTER THE DISSENT

A Groundspace Gallery project - Oct/Nov 2013 - Curated by Susan Joseph. Painting / Video Installation - 6 paintings + monitor. Ships from Los Angeles, CA.

Alex Kritselis's installation revisits the expulsion from Eden into our world. "After the Dissent", Eden was created again and sold as Imperial Eden.

Imperial Eden/After the Dissent examines the willingness of people to risk everything for the right to self-determination. The exhibition was composed of small painted panels, or fragments, which are configured into a large-scale installation. In these paintings Kritselis explored the perpetual friction of values and the behavioral patterns they generate. The show highlights that the desire for knowledge can’t be constrained. The expulsion from Eden remains in effect.

Three years earlier Kritselis had began painting on small wood panels, searching for new ways to develop his ideas. The panels’ hard surface allowed me to expand the range of technical interventions and opened the process to new explorations of color and texture. Fragmentation was adopted as a compositional device and the grid became the framework that holds the parts together. Eventually larger groupings were created and narratives sprang into place that allowed him to organize and express his ideas. While the paintings are under constant consideration, retaining their flexibility, and adapting to new spaces, they are also operating as a metaphor of how information travels, and an expression of our ability to create meaning out of fragments.

ABOVE THE FOLD - ATTACKS, ACCOUNTS, LOOKING & LOSSES

“What has happened makes the world. Live on the edge, looking.” ~ Robert Creeley

Excerpt from Betty Brown’s catalog essay, 2011:

September 11, 2001 is often referred to as “The Day the World Changed.” But how did it change? And what has that change done to our perceptions of who we are and how we see the world?

Alex Kristelis’s remarkable Above the Fold holds a mirror up to our ruminations on these questions and asks us to go beyond media hype and jingoist hysteria to see ourselves—and our world—in complex new ways. Kristelis collected 366 Los Angeles Times newspapers, from September 11, 2001 through September 11, 2002. He stacked them in his downtown studio, unopened and folded flat to reveal the banner headlines and bright photographs that announced the leading events of the day. Over that fateful year, as the news fluctuated between shock, anger, mourning, and—ultimately--revenge, the stacks grew into twin towers of newsprint demanding reconsideration. For the artist, this meant aesthetic contextualization.

Description: The installation includes 365 daily editions of the Los Angeles Times, between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2002, folded ABOVE THE FOLD and enclosed in transparent UV plastic to be exhibited on the gallery floor. The installation also includes all the LA Times newspapers of that year digitized and running on a continued loop. A Long Ranger episode from the TV series to be viewed on a separate screen, split in two and edited to run, both from beginning to end and from the end toward the beginning. Three side-by-side large video projections, in the center a video projection of an open-heart surgery flagged by two rippling-water projections on either side. Bleachers to provide the viewer with a panoramic view of the total news-scape of that year, courtesy of the LA Times, several binoculars to help the viewer explore text and images, patterns and placement and a whisper of a quiet heartbeat that runs throughout the duration of the exhibition.