Alex Israel at The Huntington

Alex Israel lives and works in Los Angeles, where he was born in 1982. Deeply entwined with his home town, Israel’s art explores the iconography of L.A. and Hollywood, and the cult of celebrity. It posits L.A. as central to an understanding of American culture and the American dream. The exhibition ”Alex Israel at The Huntington” places 16 of Israel’s paintings and sculptures, as well as two site-specific murals, among the works in the historic Huntington Art Gallery, which once served as the residence of Gilded Age collectors Henry and Arabella Huntington and, since 1928, as the gallery for a celebrated European art collection. Intended to spark a dialogue between the new and the old, this intervention of Israel’s work within the Gallery creates a discourse on place and identity, two things fundamental to understanding Henry Huntington’s own love of Southern California, a region whose identity he helped to forge.

The works in “Alex Israel at The Huntington,” all dated between 2012 and 2015, will be seeded throughout the Gallery’s two stories. Examples of the intervention include the artist’s most recent sculpture, the ghostly, life-sized Self-Portrait (Wetsuit) (painted aluminum) installed in the large library, and (crystal mounted on black glass base), an homage to a significant prop in the 1983 Tom Cruise film, placed on the mantel of the Huntingtons’ stately dining room in dialogue with the room’s elaborate18th-century crystal chandelier.

The Gallery’s grand double staircase framing views of formal gardens will become the location for a site-specific scenic-painting intervention, transforming the central interior wall of the mansion into a sort of enormous, fragmented sky.

Just outside the Thornton Portrait Gallery (where The Blue Boy hangs) will be three grand-manner-sized Israel self-portraits (acrylic and bondo on fiberglass), one depicting the artist in a blue satin L.A. Dodgers’ starter jacket reminiscent of Blue Boy’s iconic suit. Israel’s portraits are intended to complement—and comment on—the grand gallery, which is filled with 17th- and 18th-century portraits of famous figures of the British noble class as well that of Sarah Siddons, the great actress and celebrity of 18th-century London.