Alexander Skats's practice revolves around the material, technical, and conceptual aspects of painting and image-making. His most recent works are primarily based on his own photography, marking a shift away from an earlier reliance on found imagery—such as images sourced from the internet, film stills, and popular culture—which he previously used as a way to control and direct visual content.
I’m interested in the image as something both sculpted and lost—how cropping, repetition, and omission can charge a gesture with more presence than the whole.Alexander Skats
Literary and art-historical references play a central role in his work, serving as tools to project ideas and to blur the boundaries between fiction and realism, as well as between time and memory, in an effort to better understand the present.
Earlier projects engaged explicitly with literary and cinematic sources. For example, the exhibition Avalanche with PPP included works based on Robert Bresson’s film L’Argent (1984), itself loosely inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Forged Coupon. More recent works, including those presented in The Rose Window, draw on the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke, particularly his reflections on attentive observation of the world.
Skats employs both his own photographs of domestic scenes and still lifes, as well as images drawn from public archives, filtering them through literary frameworks to explore the shifting and ambiguous boundaries between public and private selves.