Alex Dordoy: The Flowers and the Hours

GRIMM is pleased to present The Flowers and the Hours, a solo exhibition of new works by English artist Alex Dordoy (b. 1985, Newcastle, UK), on view at the New York gallery from 25 October to 7 December 2024.

In his new series of paintings, Dordoy works from a wide range of source imagery and aims to capture fleeting moments of reverie and tension. For this exhibition, Dordoy has returned to familiar subject matter, such as birds and travel posters. Each painting oscillates between the romantic and the sinister, the body of work as a whole an oblique reflection of the world in this moment. 

At the core of the show are the artist’s ‘bird paintings’, which are adapted from stock images of Japanese White-Eyes and executed as though intimate portraits. Placed amid cherry blossoms and rendered in an array of positions and colors, the birds’ play on the romantic tropes of nature and beauty is undercut by a feeling of strange disquiet. They both embody a fleeting moment and are forever trapped in it, poised in silent anticipation.

Intuitively drawn to a bright, saturated, color palette that evokes the 1980s, Dordoy digitally manipulates each source image in Photoshop, fastidiously mixing colors and adjusting gradation. Adapting his painting process from work to work, the artist aims to maximize the tension between blurred backgrounds and sharp foregrounds, as though capturing each moment with a rapid shutter lens. There is an irony and distance to Dordoy’s technical approach that gives the paintings an otherworldly and unsettling feeling. 

The exhibition also includes two new ‘travel poster’ paintings, another fixture in the artist’s body of work. Adapting imagery from mid-20th century American train company advertisements, Dordoy is drawn to the sense of motion and transition that they communicate. In particular, the artist notes that the train in the painting entitled Flight from the City is like a “bullet traveling through space, about to bolt into nothingness.”  

In additional works, Dordoy integrates a stock image of a starter pistol for a race as well as a black and white image from a 1920’s sack race. In the former, the artist aims to capture the moment of anticipatory tension before the race starts, again using a highly saturated palette. In the latter, he has digitally blurred the layers and cropped his source imagery in order to create a centralized focal point. By using airbrushing, he is able to push the boundaries of acrylic paint, while faintly retaining a ghost of the artist’s presence. 

About the artist

Alex Dordoy (b. 1985 in Newcastle, UK) lives and works in London (UK). He received his BFA from the Glasgow School of Art (UK) in 2007 and completed the residency program at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (NL) in 2009. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: Prepositions, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (UK), 2024; Answering Machine, GRIMM, London (UK), 2022; Monster, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL), 2022; The Weather Channel, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (UK), 2021; Ruin is Rune, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2020; Summers’ Ego, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL), 2018; The Moss is Dreaming, curated by Tom Morton, Blain|Southern, London (UK), 2017; From Svalbard Soil, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (UK), 2017; Model T, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (UK), 2015; Sleepwalker, De Ateliers Debut Series, Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL), 2014; and Persitencebeatsresistance, Inverleith House, Edinburgh (UK), 2014. 

Dordoy has been included in numerous group exhibitions including: Self-Portraits, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2024; Im Frage, Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen (NL), 2020; Away in the Hill, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2019; Doodle & Disegno, Blain|Southern, Berlin (DE), 2018; Future Eaters, Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield East (AU), 2017; and Use/User/Used, Zabludowicz Collection, London (UK), 2016.

Dordoy’s work can be found in many private collections, as well as the collections of AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); The David and Indre Roberts Collection, London (UK); THE EKARD COLLECTION; KRC Art Collection, Voorschoten (NL); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); and the Start Museum, Shanghai (CN), among others.