Beautiful and grotesque, David Altmejd.

David Altmejd (born 1974) is a Canadian sculptor who lives and works in Los Angeles. He creates highly detailed sculptures that often blur the distinction between interior and exterior, surface and structure, the beautiful and grotesque, figurative representation and abstraction. Born in Montreal, Quebec, Altmejd earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Altmejd completed his Masters of Fine Arts at Columbia University in 2001. Since graduating with an MFA, Altmejd has taken part in many solo and group exhibitions globally, including numerous exhibitions with galleries that represented his work, Andrea Rosen Gallery, N.Y., and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. Altmejd's sculptures present viewers with an amalgam of organic random objects such as decapitated werewolf heads with graffiti-style Stars of David, towers made of mirrors, plastic flowers and costume jewelry as creative tools for sculptural systems loaded with what he calls "symbolic potential" and "open-ended" narratives. Altmejd deals with duality in his work, between the contrasts of the beautiful and the grotesque, figurative representation and abstraction, interior and exterior. For Altmejd, there is tension in the dualities of opposites, which is how he creates energy in his work. Werewolf heads appear frequently in his work which in the contemporary art world are widely recognized as being closely recognized with the Canadian creator and visionary. They featured prominently in his 2011 solo exhibition at the Brant Foundation, Art Study Centre, Greenwich, Connecticut, including many other sculpture platforms. Literary figures and popular cultural icons are central to his art and have been seen as in some way resembling the artist, such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney, Paul McCarthy, Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, and novelists and filmmakers, David Cronenberg, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mary Shelley. Altmejd is represented by Xavier Hufkens, White Cube (since 2018) and David Kordansky Gallery (since 2020) He previously worked with Andrea Rosen Gallery. [Follow David Altmejd to learn more]   / daltmejd