(French-Mexican, b. 1991 in New York, NY, lives and works in New York)
As a rapidly up-and-coming artist, Alexis de Chaunac draws from Nature, literature, religion, mythology, art history, politics, and his own multicultural background to produce exuberant, mixed-media drawings. He describes drawing as “a transcendental language that anyone can understand”. He works quickly, often with ink because of its fluidity, producing rich, multilayered works filled with faces and laden with cultural references. De Chaunac draws inspiration from such diverse artists as Rembrandt, Goya, Delacroix, Schiele, Picasso, and Francis Bacon, whom he groups together as “chroniclers of the human condition”. His own artistic rendering of humanity comes from literature. He claims influences from the Scriptures to great epics and all the way to Beat Generation writers such as William S. Burrough. Referring to his practice as contemporary myth making, he takes archetypes such as Oedipus, Jesus Christ or Dante “working out of them to explore the primitive aspects of human nature”. Recognizing that art and the sacred have always been connected since both question death and challenge the passage of time.
Born in New York and raised in Mexico City and Paris, he grew up drawing in the studio of his grandfather – renowned Mexican artist Jose Luis Cuevas. He then came to the US to study at the Sarah Lawrence College, NY. He shows with Silas von Morisse Gallery in New York, NY and already has had his first museum solo exhibition at the Museo Iconografico del Quijote, Guanajuato, Mexico (2014) and The Pinacoteca Diego Rivera (2015).
see attached pdf for exhibitions and bibliography:
