Smithsonian American Art Museum
Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow
November 19, 2010 – May 8, 2011
This first major survey of the work of Alexis Rockman (b. 1962) features approximately 50 paintings and works on paper to trace the artist's development from the mid-1980s to the present. Rockman combines art history, science, and popular culture to address a range of subjects from evolutionary biology and genetic engineering to deforestation and global climate change. From sources as diverse as botanical illustrations, museum dioramas, 19th-century landscape painting, science fiction films, and firsthand field study, he has built a universe of species and scenarios that confound basic perceptions of the living world. His vivid images transport the viewer to a place that is at once bountiful and besieged, where long-extinct creatures inhabit the ruins of modern monuments and household pets drift among the cosmos.
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