He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); The Kitchen, New York (2010); and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2009). Hubbard’s works have also been featured in group exhibitions at Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2016); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Museo Experimental del Eco, Mexico City (2014); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon (2014); and the 2010 Whitney Biennial; among others.

Works by the artist are featured in the collections of numerous institutions, including Art Institute of Chicago; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; FRAC Corsica, Corte; FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Seattle Art Museum; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; University of Chicago; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Alex Hubbard (b. 1975, Tolego, Oregon) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work encompasses video art and painting, exploring the boundaries of each via a cross-examination that invigorates both media in new and inventive ways. Constructed along parallel lines, his videos and paintings explore composition, mass, color and depth of images in unexpected ways. Avoiding a single point of focus, Hubbard constructs his videos in layers, engulfing the viewer with bold colors, performative gestures and evolving, all-over compositions in which movement is multi-directional and time appears to be non-linear. Often described as ‘moving paintings’, the videos are a record of physical creation and destruction, with the hand of the artist tangible, and sometimes visible, in the frame.

In counterpoint to the videos, Hubbard’s paintings often suggest a mechanical means of production. Fields of color in fiberglass and resin are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint. Working with fast-drying materials, such as epoxy and latex, the artist is forced to act quickly, embracing chance happenings and reveling in the autonomy of his chosen media. Such anti-hierarchical materials and techniques provide a corollary to the DIY aesthetic of the video works. And through this deconstruction every traditional opposition of the formal language of painting is opened up: figure and ground, material and illusionistic depth, the horizontality of production and the verticality of display.

[Simon Lee Gallery]