Summer - Fall 2009
Artexte welcomes New York-based artist Alex Kwartler to a research residency that focuses on the career of a Canadian artist of the same name whose practice has become inadvertently entwined with that of his own.
Despite the obvious differences between their individual origins and art practices, their shared name continues to generate confusion, particularly from electronic resources on the internet. In an effort to better understand this biographical ambiguity (and perhaps to mine its richness for future work), the artist will dedicate his residency to consult in-print, documentary resources on Alexander Kwartler at Artexte as well as at other institutions in Montreal and Ottawa.
Alex Kwartler was born in New York City in 1979, where he lives and works. Recipient of a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2002, he has presented his work in the U.S. in numerous exhibitions including Wu-Tang/curry-grit at Gavin Brown Enterprise, The Painted World at P.S1, and most recently in Parallel at Bortolami (New York). Kwartler has also shown his art internationally in exhibitions such as The Merits of Silence at Min Min Gallery (Tokyo) and Dark Dreams at Johnen Galerie (Cologne). His work has appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker, and it will be featured in a forthcoming book on abstraction published by Phaidon Press.