With a career spanning over three decades, internationally acclaimed artist Alexis Rockman is well known for his complex, large scale paintings and works on paper depicting the collision between civilization and nature. The artist synthesizes elements of human history, natural science and landscape painting; a passionate interest in climate change and globalization; and a healthy dose of art history and science fiction, to create images that reveal our world balancing on the precipice. Beyond their lush surfaces, radiant washes of color, and technical inventiveness belies a dark humor, an intense curiosity and a probing intelligence that serves to heighten the power and urgency of his invented narratives. Works on Paper is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s graphic work, documenting his extraordinary accomplishments as a draftsman through a meticulous selection of watercolors, gouaches, oil drawings, field studies, and sketchbooks. Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the book reproduces 120 works, many of which have never before been published. Included are his earliest watercolors from the 1980s, often of hybrid and mutated animals; Field Drawings, created in Guyana and other remote locations from mud sourced on site; the ominously beautiful and apocalyptic Weather Drawings; painterly works relating to his epic The Great Lakes Cycle; and Lost at Sea, his most recent body of work reimagining famed and historic shipwrecks. The book includes a visual appendix of Rockman's graphic influences, with commentary by the artist. Works on Paper is a valuable addition to scholarship on the artist, providing a critical understanding of a visionary oeuvre made at the intersection of art, nature and science.
