Alexis Rockman

From my review of “Alexis Rockman: The Weight of Air” at Brandeis’ Rose Art Museum:

Rockman is known for an illustrationy style, but in the 39 works in “The Weight of Air” at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum, a show organized by Rose director Michael Rush, he adopts an expressionist action-painting style while holding to the disasters-of-global-climate-change theme. These paintings from 2005 to ’07 are a catalogue of The Day After Tomorrow–style weather calamities: a truck chugging through a blizzard; a fire throwing a big black cloud up at the horizon; the edges of neighborhoods collapsing into mudslides; rusting ships marooned in a desert that was once the Aral Sea; a car on a muddy road with its brake lights glowing as a great big brown beast of a tornado blenders the landscape.

Read the rest here.

Related:
My June 2007 overview of global warming art, including Alexis Rockman’s “Manifest Destiny” (2004), a 24-foot-long mural that depicts a freaky future New York flooded by global climate change.

“Alexis Rockman: The Weight of Air,” Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 415 South St., Waltham, May 8 to July 27, 2008.