Gaga is pleased to announce Alex Hubbard’s fifth exhibition at the gallery.

Alex Hubbard (b. 1975 Toledo, 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.

Recent solo exhibitions include Staircase Descending A Nude, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse, Zurich 2022; Alex Hubbard, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, China 2021; Alex Hubbard: The Corner of the Table, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, USA 2019; Projectors, Gaga, Los Angeles, USA, 2019. Recent group exhibitions include Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum 2019; Pacific Rim Job, Telles Fine Art, 2018; Selections from the Marciano Collection, Marciano Foundation, 2018; Social Surfaces, Artist’s Space, NY 2017.

In June 2008 Gaga presented Alex Hubbard’s first show in Mexico. Eight years later and with a prolific and experimental practice following it it’s possible to confirm the transformations in his work: his questioning of the pertinence of painting and what abstraction is today. Is it stuck in a dead end or rather in a sort of loop like the one traced with the works in the show?

Portrait of a German painter (Female), the unlikely twin of Portrait of a German painter (Male), winks to the German abstract painting tradition to which the artist has always identified with. Halfway between readymade and abstraction this painting becomes a window that opens into a doubt. Could we still say we stand in front of an abstract painting?

In their own way the three pieces of the series Bar Paintings share this same instability oscillating between painting and sculpture. With their small format they presume a continuation of the domestic space apparent in the artist’s individual bars as medicine cabinets to alleviate solitude and the present conditions surrounding contemporary production. For a moment the images covering them function as mere props. More than paintings these are theatrical gestures that yield secret space – the possibility of escape hidden only to be canceled by the image and its own iconic seduction. Painting giving up painting and returning to it. For the ones who know Hubbard’s work this sudden meddling into the figurative draws attention. Are these pentimentos on his own abstract work? Maybe the answer could be found in Itchy-Chaps where the image that serves as an invite to ‘El Cafecito’ blurs and we observe it at the same moment when we enter abstract territory.

The show closes with El Templo, where more than closing it opens its view to an overlook where we can see at a distance a ghostly imagined city space projected onto another ghost, the image of a sculpture in a video.

In turn the whole set of works convey a meeting place as in a a café.

“En este mundo no hay nada cierto, salvo la muerte y los impuestos.”
Benjamín Franklin

“¡Muerte, impuestos y partos! Nunca hay un momento conveniente para ninguno de ellos.”
Margaret Mitchell, Lo que el viento se llevó, 1936.

Primero la noción de persona, del latín personare, que quiere decir resonar. Era la mascara usada por los actores, luego se convirtió en el papel o el actor mismo, para luego derivar en un individuo de la raza humana. Aquel que en la vida real representa una función y que existe hasta el momento de su muerte.

Luego persona moral, del latín persona ficta como forma jurídica y mores, costumbre. O persona jurídica, una entidad no natural o física vista por la ley con el estatus de persona; un sujeto aparente que oculta a los verdaderos. Existe como consecuencia del acto jurídico de constitución y puede tener una vida que exceda la de aquellas personas que la constituyen.

Entonces la pregunta es, ¿cómo y qué declarar ya sea como persona física o como persona moral, en la dinámica de la exposición colectiva de verano? Performances pasados, retratos, cuerpos y proyectos de largo plazo, personajes ficticios y Empresas… Para aquellos que declaran y aquellos que deciden no hacerlo. Para aquellas personas morales y las que son inmorales, e incluso aquellas que no existen.

Fernando Mesta
Junio 2010 , México D.F.

AND comes crawling out from under the floor, looking smug maybe
keeping a secret, knocking it’s head as it stands up
only to be squashed by YOU
YOU dropped like an anvil right on top of the now exhausted AND
the two uneasily entwined
AND slipping between the cracks,
YOU dusty and fading in the light gray afternoon light
Both words slightly stunned by the flash of DID,
DID popping and expanding to the point of cracking –
then in a flash, a snap – slapped in the face to join the pile of it’s relatives
by an angry grayish sepia WHAT –
WHAT hangs in the air,
just for a second before starting to teeter like a drunk trying his
hardest to stand and sleep and keep every one’s attention at the same
time….
then they are all there blended or julienned or minced.
Finally pushed by the next unknown word (only a stutter at this point)
into a barrel of water, all steaming as they drown.
(S’s climb out on a stairway made out of punctuation)
Our view closes down to just a pinhole.
Then black.

YOU dusty and fading in the light gray afternoon light
Both words slightly stunned by the flash of DID,
DID popping and expanding to the point of cracking –
then in a flash, a snap – slapped in the face to join the pile of it’s relatives
by an angry grayish sepia WHAT –
WHAT hangs in the air,
just for a second before starting to teeter like a drunk trying his
hardest to stand and sleep and keep every one’s attention at the same
time….
then they are all there blended or julienned or minced.
Finally pushed by the next unknown word (only a stutter at this point)
into a barrel of water, all steaming as they drown.
(S’s climb out on a stairway made out of punctuation)
Our view closes down to just a pinhole.
Then black.

Alex Hubbard lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He was born in Newport Oregon in 1975. This is his first show in Mexico City.