“A great and unlikely success story, Da Corte creates funny and therapeutic works in the hope of easing the ‘exquisite pain’ of modern life.” –New York Times
This comprehensive monograph celebrates the acclaimed Philadelphia-based installation artist Alex Da Corte (born 1980), famed for his show-stopping 2021 Roof Garden Commission for the Met, As Long as the Sun Lasts. Da Corte’s Day-Glo works are distinctly rooted in traditional American arts and culture—tellingly, as a teenager he planned to become an animator for Disney—and the artist himself often appears in his films, impersonating iconic figures such as Popeye, the Statue of Liberty, Fred Rogers or Eminem. Throughout, the pop flavor of Da Corte’s aesthetics is mixed with a satirical existentialism: his works often combine sadness and effortless play, connecting our sense of self with consumer culture—from the films we watch to the objects we buy, give and throw away.
Published for a major retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and documenting all of his major works to date, Alex Da Corte: Mr. Remember matches the artist’s high-production, ultra-chromatic sensibility in its gorgeous production, with a three-color cloth binding, silver foil on the cover, a paperback volume sewn into the book and an abundance of riotous color throughout, with more than 100 pages of installation views from previous exhibitions.
Visual artist(s): Alex Da Corte
Foreword by: Poul Erik Tøjner
Text by: Bruce Hainley, Derek McCormack, Sarah Nicole Prickett, William Pym, Mathias Ussing Seeberg, Delia Solomons, Steven Zultanski
Interviewer(s): Mathias Ussing Seeberg