Alex Da Corte's Slow Graffiti Installation at Vienna Secession

Alex Da Corte, Slow Graffiti, installation view, Secession 2017. Courtesy of Maccarone, New York, Gió Marconi, Milan and David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen. Photo by Sophie Thun.

American artist Alex Da Corte creates videos, sculptures, paintings, and immersive installations with a striking cinematic quality. Exploring the formal potential of artefacts of consumer culture, Da Corte twists their immediate meaning so they can unfold new symbolic power. Colour and textures are used with great skill to affect viewers and the mood in which they experience the artist’s environments once they set foot in them.

For his first major solo exhibition in Europe, Alex Da Corte has created a new work for the Vienna Secession. With his immersive installation, Slow Graffiti, the artist turns the 600 square metre iconic gallery space into a kind of fractured cityscape full of dysfunctional objects.

Velvet-clad walls and a patchwork carpet that covers the floor with its template pattern give the setting a soft touch. Various objects and sculptures assembled in Doctor Frankenstein’s spirit are scattered on the floor. Set in a quiet sitting area, a video is screened every 20 minutes.

Slow Graffiti radiates softness, vulnerability, mutability, and transience—like the verve of an invisible city, one that exists only in someone’s imagination but that takes shape here. Against the backdrop of today’s accelerated digital world, the exercised care and communal spirit of making can be considered a radical act of transgression.

Alex Da Corte’s Slow Graffiti is on show from July 6 – September 3, 2017.