Alexis Kersey
Solace II, 2006
Born in 1972 in Mysore, Karnataka, Alexis Kersey is a largely self taught artist. He was later …
A consummate global citizen (part-English, part-Australian, born and raised in India), Alexis Kersey samples from high and low culture, the sacred and the profane, East and West, and the traditional and the avant-garde to produce his sumptuous, lurid, mixed-media paintings. “To me, the art of the sign board painters and the pictorial language of Indian street advertising hold as much value as, say, abstract art, in terms of poignancy,” he says. With this democratic approach, Kersey combines abstraction and representation in works like Im Speak Di Trut (2008) where two seemingly holy figures, one resembling a Buddhist monk, the other a South Asian priest, glare at each other across a fiery lake and sun-burnt sky filled with skull-shaped balloons—a sardonic commentary on the guru figure in both Eastern and Western culture.
Born in 1972 in Mysore, Karnataka, Alexis Kersey is a largely self taught artist. He was later brought up in England and eventually returned to India in 1990 to understand and reconnect with the indigenous culture and life. One could say that his visual language has its roots in both cultures.
The imagery he draws is …
A consummate global citizen (part-English, part-Australian, born and raised in India), Alexis Kersey samples from high and low culture, the sacred and the profane, East and West, and the traditional and the avant-garde to produce his sumptuous, lurid, mixed-media paintings. “To me, the art of the sign board painters and the pictorial language of Indian street advertising hold as much value as, say, abstract art, in terms of poignancy,” he says. With this democratic approach, Kersey combines abstraction and representation in works like Im Speak Di Trut (2008) where two seemingly holy figures, one resembling a Buddhist monk, the other a South Asian priest, glare at each other across a fiery lake and sun-burnt sky filled with skull-shaped balloons—a sardonic commentary on the guru figure in both Eastern and Western culture.
