Alex Urban
born 1978
Alex Urban (born 1978) is a painter, sculptor and a photographer. She often uses the aesthetics of kitsch and pop culture clichés, as well as a bright palette of colours that intensifies the impression of the unreal. Her paintings are filled with princesses, cartoon characters, animals, and children. But this innocent, fairy-tale, colourful, and sometimes parochial/folksy universe serves the artist to expose the abuses of the real world: violence and sexism. Urban’s characteristic universe resembles the world of David Lynch's films. The artist experiments with the feelings of weirdness and not fitting in. She borrows situations known from TV programmes, newspapers, and the Internet, and later interprets them herself. As a result, we are most often faced with depictions that are quite absurd. At other times, Urban’s phantasmagoric characters placed within realistic surroundings appear to be necessarily suspicious, and their banal activities are not what they seem.
