Alex Israel - New Now New York Wednesday, March 8, 2023 | Phillips

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  • Sky Backdrop, executed in 2013, is the third largest painting by Alex Israel to arrive at auction. Spanning over 9 feet tall and 16 feet wide, the present work is a monumental example of the artist’s fascination with the California skyline and film backdrops. Executed three years after the artist earned his MFA from the University of Southern California, Sky Backdrop is an early example of the artist’s most iconic imagery. In a 2015 interview, Israel stated that after he finished “graduate school, I had this idea about making portraits of people in Los Angeles and using the talk show as a format to do that. I started designing the talk show set, and as the background of the set, I wanted a giant L.A. twilight sky.”i Sky Backdrop, with its scale and familiar color palette, is a love letter to Hollywood.

    “Beyond its magical regionalism, for me, Los Angeles is America. Los Angeles is the place where the American Dream comes to life. We witness this on television, season after season. The American Dream is a powerful and moving thing. So much of the imagery that illustrates this dream is pure L.A. cliché. These clichés carry so much symbolic weight and meaning; they activate people's imaginations and inspire them to find a better way, and a better life.”
    —Alex Israel

    Israel’s backdrops appear almost as a portal to this “better life,” both inviting and confounding in their obviously virtual promise. The absence of anything but lush color alludes to the impressionist ideal of the imagined, exaggerated beauty of one’s surroundings. Other works from the Sky Backdrop series are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and The Broad, Los Angeles.

     

     

    i Alex Israel, quoted in Aram Moshayedi, “Alex Israel,” Interview Magazine, December 30, 2014, online.

    • Provenance

      Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2013

Property from a Distinguished New York Collection

175

Sky Backdrop

signed, stamped with the Warner Bros. Studio, Burbank, CA. stamp and dated "Alex Israel '13" on the reverse
acrylic on canvas
108 x 192 in. (274.3 x 487.7 cm)
Painted in 2013.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Head of Sale, New Now
212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 8 March 2023