Alexander Gorlizki, born in 1967 and working from studios in Brooklyn, New York, and Jaipur, India, is known primarily for works on paper. This exhibition, Alexander Gorlizki: Variable Dimensions, however, brings together the artist’s work in drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and the applied arts—carpets, wallpapers, textiles—for a rich kaleidoscopic experience of the artist’s profoundly creative imagination.
“Variable Dimensions” refers to an entity without fixed boundaries. It is shifting and not easy to define. It also suggests layers or multi-faceted experiences, imaginative worlds that can be viewed in different and occasionally contrasting terms: Western art and Asian art, the spiritual and the prosaic, cartoon imagery and a rarified, poetic sensibility.
Gorlizki crosses boundaries without a second glance. In addition to his own studio practice, he has worked with embroiderers, spectacle makers, forgers and fakers, cobblers, knitters, tailors, watchmakers, stone masons, manicurists, designers, musicians and film-makers. Within the exhibition, you will find art in the form of embroidered handkerchiefs, plant-like hand-mirrors alongside exquisitely crafted paintings with obsessive floral and geometric patterns, most familiar in the Islamic arts.
What’s the connection to Asian Art? All the work is informed by and/or partially fabricated in India. Rather than being stylistically Indian, it refers to an artist’s relationship with India.
Prepare to come unhinged, as the artist moves across formats, media, and sensations. Prepare to laugh at the absurdity of our need to rationalize, narrate, systematize, interpret. Gorlizki will defy you with juxtapositions of elements garnered by his roving eye from world cultures, with particular fondness for the visual vocabularies of Mughal painting, Central Asian stitchery, and biomorphic symbolism.
“Variable Dimensions” refers to an entity without fixed boundaries. It is shifting and not easy to define.
Come prepared to have fun and to see and feel intensely.