TWIN PICKS : Alex Prager

08.02.2022 | Art | BY:

Theatrical staging, high-drama and luxurious technicolour – photographer and filmmaker Alex Prager’s large-scale photographs feature ensemble casts that teeter between reality and artifice. 

Afternoon, 2021, courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London

In this intimate series classic American archetypes are presented in the cinematic colour palette of a Hollywood Western. A cowboy, a cherub, an air stewardess, all frozen, suspended mid-air. Artefacts of modern American life seem to float  – or fall – alongside them.

Dawn, 2021, courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London

Part One: The Mountain at London’s Lehmann Maupin gallery continues her exploration of the hyperreal. The series was created as a response to the last two years and the effects of the pandemic. Prager’s meticulously constructed characters are paired with details from the character’s backstories – casino chips, prozac and a pair of high heels capture our human idiosyncrasies. 

Twilight, 2021, courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London

Prager plays on the tradition of classical portraiture as a way to encourage people to really look at one another again. After such a long period of isolation and polarisation, she works to flatten people out and then hone in on our emotional states. These questions are infused into each portrait, creating a spiritual death and consequently – rebirth. Shot in her hometown of Los Angeles, The Mountain draws on the themes of revelation, pilgrimage, achievement, and adversity. 


Alex Prager’s Part One: The Mountain is at London’s Lehmann Maupin gallery until March 5 2022.

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