Alexander Ross

(American, born in Denver, Colorado, 1960)
Untitled, 2007
Colored pencil on paper
30 1/4 x 22 3/4 inches (768 x 578 mm)
Purchased as the gift of Whitney B. Armstrong and on the Young Associates Fund for Twentieth-Century Acquisitions; 2008.40

Photography by Kevin Noble, courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, NY.

Alexander Ross established his reputation in the 1990s with paintings and drawings of fanciful images derived from microscopic visions of cellular organisms, merging references to Surrealism, Philip Guston, and science fiction. In this recent drawing, the artist's close observation of nature generates an imaginary landscape made of strange, interlocking forms delicately rendered with colored pencils. Combining volume and flatness, nature and artifice, abstraction and representation, Ross proposes a contemporary vision of nature at once playful and disquieting. This is the first work by this artist to enter the Morgan, where it joins a small but growing collection of twenty-first-century drawings.