ALEX BOLLER

b. October 31, 1991, New Paltz, New York.

Alex Boller works at the intersection of caricature and craft. His drawings and works on paper, rendered in graphite, ink, and mixed media and built up through dense hatching and gradated shading, draw equally on the tradition of political cartooning and on a more classical draftsman's discipline, holding both in tension rather than resolving them. A recurring body of work takes the logo as its subject: the identifying marks of luxury brands, subtly and grotesquely misspelled, restaged as bloated, grinning mascots dressed in their own monograms. Elsewhere the same hand turns toward the mechanisms of retail and finance, as in Amazon Crime and World Economic Feeding Frenzy, where distortion functions less as punchline than as argument. In the Flower drawings, held now in a private collection, the satire falls away entirely and the shading is left to carry the image alone, making legible a technical rigor that underwrites even his broadest jokes. That rigor is now extending into three dimensions in a new body of work, "Living Skulls," chainsaw-carved sculptures with vegetation growing from the cranium in place of hair or brain matter. Boller's figures, swollen, masked, staged among objects that read as omens, situate him in a lineage that runs through Peter Saul, Fernando Botero, and Hieronymus Bosch. Born on October 31, 1991, in New Paltz, New York,£

Boller established his first studio in Midtown Manhattan before relocating to Switzerland during the COVID-19 pandemic, where he co-founded a gallery with his brother; he later returned to the United States and built a studio in the Western Catskills, where he lives and works today. His work has been shown at Yale University, Frieze Art Fair New York, the David Nolan Gallery, and at his eponymous showroom in Zurich.