Born in California in 1988, Alex Cutler spent his formative years across America’s Southwest from Arizona to Wyoming, New Mexico, and Colorado. He earned his BFA in painting at the Metropolitan State University of Denver in 2013 after attending Front Range Community College in Boulder. His paintings have been featured in solo and group shows in Los Angeles, Denver, and Santa Fe with his most recent, notable participation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, LA. Cutler’s work is included in private collections throughout the country, and he been profiled in several publications online. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Alex Cutler is the consummate observer. His insatiable curiosity and desire to push the boundaries of painting are driving forces in his artistic practice. Greatly influenced by his childhood travels throughout the American South and Midwest, Cutler has a unique sense of engagement with the material world, be they cartoons, advertisements, or roadside signs.
He brings together elements of the familiar and pairs them with more esoteric iconography to not only tell new stories, but also recontextualize what is seen to offer new meanings and ideas. He combines art historical narratives and mass media with ease, with the occasional insertion of language to subvert and emphasize the vernacular. By synthesizing these stories, Cutler also explores our increasingly heightened media obsessed culture. Rather than the incessant scrolling through a phone, a pastiche of images consumes the entire canvas, as though one too many pop-up ads have invaded the screen to flood a single visual landscape.

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Cutler’s paintings are reminiscent of the Pop masters of the mid-twentieth century with his application of bright, bold colors and use of subjects mined from popular culture. While he finds inspiration from an array of sources such as magazines, websites, and his own neighborhood surroundings, Cutler’s fascination with the pureness of utilitarian objects has created unique, recurring motifs throughout his work. Through the careful and deliberate use of color, collage, and dimensional composition, his paintings reveal the beauty and simplicity of quotidian items ranging from a No. 2 pencil to a steel hand saw - tools that have resisted much evolution for their perfect form and function.

Drawing has also always been the grounding force behind the Cutler’s paintings. His initial desire to master the accuracy of images and objects was born at an early age through drawing incessantly in bounded notebooks and creating traditional portraits at the beginning of his professional career. Now, his technical skill inflected with raw intuition and fearless experimentation pushes Cutler’s exploration into spontaneous states of mood and mind that are unexpected and limitless. The resulting bodies of work tell a myriad of stories making connections between art historical narratives, mass media, and society’s desire for image consumption.

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Ultimately, Cutler’s work engages with our contemporary histories to create a

catalyst for our experiential futures.