Spotlight Artist

Martyna Alexander

Midwest
Artist profile photo

Test Court

Hockey rink diagram above a painted landscape with hills and a small pond.

acrylic on cotton canvas

Luz Marina’s Mud

Abstract painting with dark center, surrounded by textured brushstrokes on beige canvas.

acrylic and pigment stick on cotton canvas

New Rules, Old Ecosystems

Abstract painting with gold accents over a soft, blurred landscape in a lavender frame.

acrylic and pigment stick on cotton canvas

Featured in New American Paintings1 / 3

Artist Statement

 Alexander’s mixed ethnic background as the daughter of a Polish immigrant with Korean ancestry and a Michigan local with European ancestry profoundly shapes her perspective on connection to place as well as how identity is influenced by culture and biology. She examines the natural behaviors and landscapes that each of us are drawn to and the hidden reasons for which they form connections.

As a designer, Alexander has used her longtime practice of painting as a way to explore more subjective forms of understanding. In her practice she allows her design skills to inform her visual vocabulary and channel that very analytical process into creating abstract, anti-solution-based artworks. Her paintings live somewhere in the space between rational thought and a sense of fantasy. Exploring how ancient connections to ourselves and the contemporary frameworks we apply to our lives, environments, and culture created containers reminds us of the many man-made systems that make up our lives and that they can be unmade and changed with collective will.

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