Envoy Enterprises presents Alex Rose, Withdrawl.

The opportunity to experience the art of Alex Rose is rare. His reclusive character and deeply personal process results in the literal and metaphorical temporality of the work. Rose’s dark yet hauntingly beautiful drawings, collages, and photographs are composites of re-configured magazine and newspaper images, letters, and found objects. Once finished, Rose buries or burns the work to “lay it to rest,” documenting its destruction. This event can be seen as a ritualistic performance that establishes his creations as sacred objects, and also expresses the fear of loss. In this way, Rose is able to transcend the pain and circumstances of its making.

It is only recently that Rose has begun to lay his work to rest in boxes, as if in a coffin, which he sends to New York for exhumation by envoy. By allowing the gallery to “resurrect” his images, the artist has come to accept the possibility that their display may result in feelings of hope and understanding for viewers. In the words of curator Bob Nickas, who sees Rose as a visionary, the exhibition is an open viewing of his most recent body of work.

Innately moving, every work is made precious by careful execution and unusual technique. By producing books and diaries, and compiling documents and objects, Rose’s work has a three-dimensional property rarely addressed in collage and drawing. In medium and content, he comments on both decadence and beauty, as well as exclusion, violence, and struggles with identity and acceptance. There is a clear sense of the artist working through past experiences, creating a complex visual narrative which reflects his search for self-positioning in the world.

Alex Rose lives and works in Cork, Ireland. He began making art at the age of 13, burying family pets and building them shell and stone shrines. He went to three different art colleges in Ireland. He dropped out of the first after suffering a mini-breakdown. Between the second and third he moved briefly to London, working on construction sites and in factories. He finished Art College with the second lowest degree.