Alexis Rockman

Alexis Rockman paints plants and animals in a style that also draws on diverse sources including Dutch flower painting, nineteenth century landscape painting, science fiction movies, and natural history dioramas. Nature in Rockman’s work is a Hobbesian spectacle in which ants devour butterflies, flowers drip sinister nectars, and human creations proliferate amid feces, traps, and evolutionary cul-de-sacs. An atmosphere of luxurious decay pervades not only the subject matter, but color and use of materials. Rockman favors sickly greens, lurid reds and golds, and deep shadows. His glazes are so heavy that some canvases glisten like hams. Rockman’s most blackly humorous works synthesize genetic engineering and pornography.

A History of Art involving DNA