My paintings often begin with film stills or photographic fragments—details that have already been passed over by the eye. I isolate and recompose them, emphasizing the act of seeing itself. Hands, dashboards, half-shadows: these are not just subjects but thresholds—of memory, narration, and the image’s surface. I’m interested in the psychological tension that builds when you remove context, and how, in doing so, something deeper can emerge. I think of the digital screen as today’s cave wall—flickering with shadows we mistake for reality.
Alexander Skats
Alexander Skats (b. 1986, Gothenburg) lives and works in Malmö, Sweden.
He graduated from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Skats’ painting practice examines the tension between figuration and omission, drawing from a vast visual archive of art history, cinema, and digital media. Working with motifs extracted from film stills and photographs, his compositions are precisely cropped and stripped of extraneous detail, often focusing on gestures—particularly hands—as sites of psychological intensity.
He graduated from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Skats’ painting practice examines the tension between figuration and omission, drawing from a vast visual archive of art history, cinema, and digital media. Working with motifs extracted from film stills and photographs, his compositions are precisely cropped and stripped of extraneous detail, often focusing on gestures—particularly hands—as sites of psychological intensity.
Skats paints with a technical sensitivity that references the Old Masters while confronting the accelerated image culture of the present. His layered canvases reflect on the digital screen as a contemporary landscape, shaped by self-curation, distraction, and mythmaking. His recent bodies of work—Diaphanous Dioramas, Sycophants in a Reverie on the Western Shores and Idols of the Cave—address the production, dissemination, and metaphoric distortion of images in our technological era.
His solo and group exhibitions include Avalanche (2024), Tales of Women, Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong (2024), and The Balladist, Galleri Thomas Wallner, Stockholm (2023). In 2021, Skats completed the public commission Individuals at Uppsala City Hall. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Otto and Charlotte Mannheimer Foundation, and others.