Born in Essex in 1966, Alex Wood spent his first five years in Canada before returning to the United Kingdom and settling in a quiet Manchester suburb. During six years of Art School, studying Graphic Design and then Photography, Alex became part of the Manchester underground music scene throughout the 1980's and 1990's.

After a year divided between Paris and Milan Alex returned to Manchester and began creating 'Street Art', choosing stencils for the immediate result they gave. This lead to a commission for Factory Records Headquarters in Manchester and his work featured in the Oasis video 'Shakermaker'.

Settling in Amsterdam in 2002, Alex began re-exploring images and texts with a series of graphic canvases. Now living and working in Sweden since 2004, Alex's work has moved away from it's purely flat graphic origin towards a more layered abstraction.

Alex has recently had his debut show in New York and will be showing at the 2009 Red Dot Art Fair represented by Susan Eley Fine Art, New York.

About the Work:

Merging the authentic signifiers of abstraction, the reproducibility of pop, and the graphicness of design my paintings set up planes where visual and verbal language is refracted, confused, and reconstructed into disjointed and antagonistic compositions. Through a process incorporating hands-off painting techniques such as stencilling my work treads a fine line between beauty and discord. The concentration of my gestures combine as a veneer of suggestive descriptions. Alluding to external environment as much as internal psychological states, my images exude an energy reflecting the urban experience.

Despite their intense vivacity my canvases are piercingly austere. Executed with a limited palette, my paintings possess an imposing elegance. Within their surfaces are coded the glamour of high abstraction and the urgency of street art. Through my translucent layers, and emotive distance, the impersonal characteristics of found imagery and the detached process of working my work gains a unique subjectivity that infuses the generic with a contemplative aura of personal negotiation.