Alex Gardner

b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Alex Gardner is Long Beach-based artist. His cool, surreal canvases portray androgynous, mostly featureless Black subjects situated amid spare color fields. Gardner uses dark, inky hues to render these figures’ skin and adorns them with pastel-tinged clothing. This contrast creates both tactile warmth and a sense of distance, which is amplified thanks to the sitters’ lack of recognizable features. These anonymized forms variously raise questions about racial identity, gender roles, and the chilly nature of digital interactions. (Courtesy of Artsy).