Dan Alva

ONLINE EXHIBITION

VIEW ONLINE | 22 JUNE 2023

Maddox Gallery is excited to welcome American Contemporary artist Dan Alva for his first online solo show, “Fortune Favours the Bold”. From 22nd June, visitors to Maddoxgallery. com will be able to view the new collection of 10 large-scale paintings along with exclusive behind-the-scenes insight into Alva’s artistic process. This enthralling exhibition remasters the great masters, imprinting Alva’s signature graphic style on the art-historical canon by creating windows into his works that both conceal and reveal.

For the show, Alva uses camouflage, one of his signature motifs, to remix recognisable works of art, drawing the eye in two directions as the viewer questions what is being disclosed and what is being hidden. Suspended somewhere between the digital and the physical, his talent for transposing different genres - Vermeer’s 15th century Girl with a Pearl Earring and one of Damien Hirst’s Contemporary spin paintings, for example - is powered by technology. Before he even contemplates picking up a paintbrush, the artist painstakingly builds, manipulates and edits his works digitally to find the strongest compositions with the boldest visual impact.

Travelling back into art history but also moving forwards, Alva is part of a movement of artists who are creating the kind of transitional art in which the past and the future melt. Like the Pop Artist Andy Warhol, who transformed everyday imagery from the world of advertising into groundbreaking art, he takes iconic works of art that have become ingrained in the public consciousness and self-edits them in a way that has become iconic to him.

From the sketching of ideas to the layering of different tones, colours and shadows, designing a logo and painting a canvas are a very similar conceptual process for Alva as he slowly works towards the final image. He fell in love with the process of painting in his studio in Miami, where he often spends days studying an artist, digging deep into their lives, enabling him to feel the connection between past and present when painting.

Many of the patterns in Alva’s artworks are inspired by the world of fashion. Originally used for military purposes, he loves the fact that houses like Louis Vuitton and Valentino have taken camouflage, with its tough army image, and turned it into a fashion statement. With works like Clean Sneak - a remastered Leda and the Swan by Leonardo da Vinci - and Blow One Down a reworking of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ 17th century portrait of the Princesse de Broglie, Alva creates a similarly striking contrast - a dichotomy between classicism and abstraction where the camouflage leaves the mind to imagine what lies beneath it.

Like the title of the exhibition, “Fortune Favours the Bold”, all this is done with the knowing humour of someone who has grown up surrounded by art, design and fashion and is not afraid to put his own, unique spin on a serious masterpiece, sending a clear message that classical art can be playful, if you recontextualise it for a modern-day audience.

BIOGRAPHY

From his studio in Miami, Contemporary artist Dan Alva remixes the masters, combining his figurative visual language with bursts of camouflage, stripes and other patterns to create a bold new style of transitional art that is an abstraction of reality.

Born in 1984, Alva grew up in a family of fine artists. Hands-on from a very young age, he spent weekends with his father in the garage, fixing, building and creating. The friend who was always there to document a night out, his love of photography led to a career in first graphic design, then advertising. Today a successful creative director in the industry, his designer’s eye for shape, form and colour is matched by a prodigious talent for painting.

Alva approaches his paintings in the same way as an ad campaign, experimenting with different concepts, sketching, creating mock-ups, researching artists’ histories and thinking about how the works will be photographed, all before picking up a paintbrush. Using meticulously applied oil paint and the same methods as the masters he is remastering, he honours their individual styles while creating unexpected collaborations between artists that make the viewer question Alva’s source material, and what it has become.

Widely shown at art galleries and fairs throughout Florida and the US, Alva has participated in the prestigious Art Miami every year since 2018. He held his first solo show at the Guy Hepner Gallery in New York, also in 2018, returning for a second in 2023. In 2022, Alva’s art formed part of two group shows with Maddox Gallery in London, “Modern Renaissance.” and “Post-Pop”. His 2023 online show “Fortune Favours the Bold” is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Maddox.