b. 1989 Houston, TX
Lives and works in New York, NY
Alexandria Tarver transforms the familiar imagery of flowers into a realm that intertwines memory, idealisation, and the immediacy of presence. Her artistic journey begins with an evening ritual: wandering the streets of New York City. For Tarver, nighttime pulses with contrasts—rest, dreams, and unrestrained energy—releasing desires suppressed by daylight. It is a liminal time when chaos unfolds, stars emerge, and the city reflects an endless cycle akin to decay and renewal. The shifting hues of the urban night sky, shaped by weather, vantage points, and artificial light, provide her with a constantly changing spectrum to explore.
On these nightly walks, Tarver discovers her subjects, often clusters of flowers, in a process reminiscent of foraging. She captures them in photographs, then sketches a rough composition in pencil before finally painting them in oil on panel. Her technique draws from diverse art movements, including post-impressionism, mid-century New England representationalism, and gestural abstraction. The foundational layer of her work often features vivid blues—lapis or cerulean—that evoke twilight's charged atmosphere. Each painting evolves over weeks or months, with the twilight blues interacting dynamically with the central floral forms in fleshy tones. The blue may shift into an evening haze, deepen into purple-black, or hover in electric contrast to the city's perpetual glow.
Further explorations take Tarver’s paintings into conscious meditations on the painterly language of seascapes and blinding sun, with the relative depths learned from the nights contained therein. Rooted in the natural world, the paintings seek to find and reaffirm the experience of looking, of life.
Alexandria Tarver (b. 1989 Houston, TX; lives and works in New York, NY) graduated with a BFA from New York University in 2011. Tarver has held solo and two person exhibitions with Deli Gallery, Cooler Gallery, and Et al. gallery. The artist has also participated in group exhibitions with all of the above galleries as well as Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY; GRIMM, London, UK; Marinaro Gallery, New York, NY; Public Gallery, London, UK; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Arsenal Gallery, New York, NY; Alter Space, Mexico City, MX; Danziger Gallery Project Room, New York, NY.