Following is The New York Times exhibition review, November 14, 2014 by Ken Johnson.

Alexander Ross: 'Recent Terrestrials'
NOV. 13, 2014

Why do painters still paint? One reason is that it's an efficient way to obsess over the insoluble mind-body problem. People have physical bodies and nonphysical consciousness, but no one knows exactly how they connect. Similarly, paintings are material objects and vehicles of immaterial imagination, and the relationship between those two aspects remains magnetically mysterious.

Consider Alexander Ross's comically gross, Pop-surrealist paintings. The exhibition's most engaging works are pictures of monstrous, misshapen heads that look as if made from lumps of greasy, mostly green clay by an imaginative child. One that's depicted on a canvas nearly five feet square has its cranium peaked on one side and bulging on the other. Resting on a flat surface against a luminous pale-blue background, it has an eye like a deformed red pepper and another like a smooth cucumber jutting from its socket. With a pink tongue protruding from its wide, fiercely frowning mouth, it looks as if it wants to scare the viewer away. It's uncannily alive, but no, it's just paint. In several pictures, allover patterns of cellular shapes are interrupted by illusory gashes and punctures exposing what resembles subcutaneous pink flesh. Those paintings are like wounded animals.

Examining any of these works up close you see that Mr. Ross simultaneously produces and subverts illusions of three-dimensionality. He renders volumes by means of narrow bands of color in gradated shades the way topographers do. He's like a magician revealing the secrets of his tricks even as he performs them, but without ruining the magic.

________

Born 1960 in Denver, Colorado
Lives and works in Massachusetts

1983
BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, with distinction

1997
Philip Morris Juror's Merit Award, New American Talent: The Thirteenth Exhibition, Texas Fine Arts Association

1998
The Tesuque Foundation, Artist Fellowship Grant, Chicago

2000
American Artists at Giverny, Residency Grant, Art Production Fund, New York

2002
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, New York

2006
The Lewis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, New York

2010
New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship

2012
The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Individual Support Grant, New York
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York

Sources:
The New York Times
"Alexander Ross", David Nolan Gallery