Andrew Alba — Inheritance

b. 1986, Salt Lake City, Utah

Lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah

Andrew Alba is a prolific artist with a nontraditional background and a genuine love of communicating through thick, gestural application of oil paint and utilization of repurposed construction materials. Some highlights to his career to date are being awarded a Fellowship from the Utah Division of Arts and Museums, being an artist in residence and exhibiting with the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as being featured in multiple shows at Ogden Contemporary Arts. Borrowing techniques of abstraction from neoexpressionists, Alba’s work aims to evoke an emotional response while commenting on our wildly complex sociopolitical present. As a self-taught artist, he creates work without the theoretical constraints and critical expectations of the academy. Alba juxtaposes the clean white walls of the gallery with the rough-hewn, everyday materials of the worker. While drop cloths, drywall, mud, concrete, and lumber are not of traditional gallery ‘quality,’ he is interested in how these materials will relate to working people.

In loving rage, this work processes current social, emotional and ecological heartaches, and how inherited love and pain is bared through the repetitive cycles of grief and accountability.  In learning how to hold chaotic ranges of emotions in the unending “rotten” & “corrupt” stimuli that surrounds us, we ought to tenderly pay attention to our nature, in order to endure and also hold the past for future.

andrew-alba.com

Instagram: @andrew.alba