Bio

Alexander Reyna was born in Africa, and came to the United States when he was six. He received his BFA in Painting from the University of New Hampshire and his MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. His earliest computer was the TRS-80 and his digital skills are autodidactic. He lives and works in New York City.
Alexander Reyna has had solo exhibitions in New York and exhibitions throughout the United States and overseas. He has participated in group shows including Spaces/Cleveland, The DIVA Art Fair, The Scope Art Fair, Hunter College, and several prominent American Universities. Reyna has been featured and reviewed in interviews and publications including PS1, New York Arts Magazine, The Village Voice, NPR, and Animal Magazine. He was an Assistant Professor at Mercy College and taught in the Master's program at New York University.
He is currently on the teaching faculty at the School of Visual Arts

Philosophy

I am inspired by the banal as much as I am by the profound. One 20th century argument about art's relationship to culture proposes that art stands at the forefront of culture and works against kitsch. In many ways my efforts resists this class based notion. My work is rooted in the conceptual underpinnings of pop-that everything made in culture is art. While my art attempts to subvert this machine aesthetic and put something personal into the work, it still begins at the same root. It speaks with a dialect that is thoroughly middle class, in a language that is completely digestible, and it is this beginning which refutes the distinction between high and low.
My work deals explicitly with cultural and corporatized imagery. By choosing to use media and visual culture as a starting point but attempting to make something which is more idiosyncratic and representative of personal choice, I'm working in collaboration with corporations and others who shape the culture given to us, but subverting those authors original intentionality. My own cultural production is meaningful and serves as a testament to the contemporary world in that it catalogues what is culturally available to us and highlights technological mediums used to translate these ideas, but presents it in a form which is bound by my choice and aesthetic. The work is beautiful, profane, banal and horrific but always hyper-designed and superficial yet at the same time alluding to deeper layers of meaning.