Author(s): Alex Gross

Art

Frederick Douglass, a Centaur, serpents, Christ, and an assortment of mythical beasts are just some of the characters that appear within the world of Alex Gross's lush, incongruous paintings in Discrepancies. Historical figures coexist with fashionable men and women, often on their cell phones, and frequently set in landscapes that simultaneously invoke both Gothic Flemish Art and the metropolitan, billboard-infested urban advertising that we find inescapable in our world today. Gross's highly involved, figurative oil paintings defy categorization: his unusual hybrids, for all their dreamlike mystery, powerfully convey universal themes such as Love and Despair, Globalization and Consumerism, Communication and the lack of it. This slim, oversized edition catalogs the best of his groundbreaking work over the last four years, including several pieces from his Autumn 2010 exhibition at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York.