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.
