Alex Israel: Nostalgia as the Antidote to Doomsday Rhetoric
Interview by Sotiris Sotiriou | Photography by Justin Campbell
Alex Israel stands as a singular figure in the contemporary art landscape, operating at the intersection of celebrity culture, personal branding and the global visual vernacular of pop. Raised and based in Los Angeles, Israel has cultivated a practice that blurs the lines between artist, entrepreneur, media personality and cultural commentator. His work repurposes the material and myth of Hollywood, from painted backdrops to studio props, to reflect a world where identity is manufactured, marketed and consumed across screens and platforms.
Since launching his career in the early 2010s, Israel has become as recognisable for his aesthetic – characterised by airbrushed sunsets, oversized sunglass lenses and gleaming surfaces – as he is for his strategic positioning within overlapping creative industries. His distinctive Self-Portrait silhouette, always wearing shades, serves as a recurring motif: a mask, a logo and a meditation on authorship in an era of personal brands. Whether directing films, collaborating with luxury fashion houses or launching eyewear and clothing lines, Israel’s projects are as likely to debut on Netflix or in a Louis Vuitton campaign as in a museum.
Yet beneath the glossy exteriors lies a critical engagement with the structures of fame, desire and commodification. His installations and videos often function as entertainment but also serve as complex portraits of a culture obsessed with surface over substance. With projects spanning sculpture, digital media and narrative film, Israel continuously reimagines the role of the artist in the age of social media and streaming, where visibility is currency and art becomes content.
Here, Israel opens up about the multifaceted layers of his practice, offering insights into the conceptual strategies that drive his work, and how Los Angeles – equal parts muse, subject and collaborator – continues to shape his vision.
Sotiris Sotiriou: Los Angeles has always been central to your work – as myth, landscape and psychological space. What continues to draw you to LA as a subject, and how has your relationship with the city, and your work itself, evolved over time?
Alex Israel: LA is my home and muse. Having been born here, I was never technically drawn to it. I just grew up in it, and it’s a part of me, like DNA. People always tell young writers: Write about what you know! I guess I’ve just applied the same logic to my art practice, and LA is among the things I know best. Evolution is an interesting notion here because on the one side, yes – making one work often leads to the next, and so on and so on. Something happens in the process of making that guides the next steps, that evolves things.
But on the other hand, my practice has always been focused on the same core principle: I look closely at different facets of my city and its entertainment culture and explore them and attempt to embody them using the tools available to communicate across a variety of platforms, to as broad an audience as I can manage to reach. Technology evolves, and that motivates me, and different facets of the city just feel ripe for exploration at different moments.
Alex Israel, Heaven, 2025. Installation view. © Alex Israel. Photography Credits: Joshua White
SS: Your recent body of work, Noir, marks a distinct tonal and visual shift – moving from sun-soaked, high-gloss colour to shadow, interiority and ambiguity. What initiated this transition?
AI: Covid. It slowed me down. I started walking everywhere, and the way I began looking at everything around me changed dramatically. I began observing the city’s textures in a way I couldn’t ever have from a car window, and that certainly bled into the detailed, focused approach I took to making both my street sculpture, Sunset Coast Drive, and ultimately the Noir paintings. My previous landscapes, which I painted inside my Self-Portrait silhouettes, were all about producing perfect, photorealist painted images, of the frictionless variety, primed for social media algorithms.
The Noir paintings take things in a different direction: idealised documentation of the city has been replaced by a desire to capture something that can’t be seen through a camera. These new images are rooted in the reality of my memory, and they are meant to envision LA as a kind of magical fantasia.
SS: And the continued lack of figuration in these newer works, are these moments you see the viewer inserting themselves into, as either LA residents or visitors, or do you feel a sense of disconnect and voyeurism should be palpable?
AI: They could certainly act as vessels of projection for the viewer. They’re also backdrops, quite literally. I work with a background artist to create the rendering for each Noir painting, and then these renderings are painted by a scenic artist at Warner Brothers, who was trained to paint backdrops for film and television before the craft reached its expiration date with the advent of new, advanced digital technologies. So, they are like sets, completed by their viewers who in some way become the actors in this relationship.
If you distil entertainment down to its essence, I think an argument could be made that you’d be left with a stage and an actor, a context and a character, a frame and a protagonist, as you will. And this Hollywood figure-ground dynamic is certainly something I’ve thought about consistently since I began exhibiting art, since my very first solo show of [movie studio] props and Flats.
SS: The recent work seems to bristle with anticipation. Scenes that, in this day and age, would usually imply activity and hyper-social interaction, yet they are left barren. Is it the treatment and history of film noir that encouraged this type of representation?
AI: Yes – the eeriness of film noir and the frequent inability of its characters to recognise fact versus fiction, to question society’s morals and systems of justice – these tropes were very inspiring to me when I began creating this body of work. And at times they've felt quite connected to the tenets of surrealism: exploring dreams and alternative psychologies, forgoing known structures in favour of randomness and chance. Certain surrealist formal tropes were also inspiring, such as the vacant streets of [Edward] Hopper and [Giorgio] de Chirico.
SS: You have mentioned in the past that we are, “living on the precipice of an apocalypse”. Do you see these works as ways to evaluate how we live as humans today, how to look at what we have built and how we have gotten here?
AI: I think these works offer much by way of nostalgia, and I think nostalgia is key to the survival of a society that faces the kind of urgent doomsday rhetoric we all encounter now, on a daily basis.
SS: Heaven, at the Aspen Art Museum, is an interesting contrast to Noir, with both on view around the same time. In Heaven, you use Ruthie’s, the restaurant built by Frank Lerner in the ’80s, as a backdrop for a cast of full-figured dead celebrities. This still seems to apply a sense of reverence to place and physical history, although in this instance you have populated the scene. Can you elaborate on why, or if, these two bodies of work might situate themselves in the same universe?
AI: I think you’ve more than hinted at the connection between these two bodies of work in your question! Yes, in many ways, the Noir paintings were the backdrops and the Heaven portraits the figures in a single play or drama. Each body of work occupied one side of the same entertainment coin – predicated on the idea that entertainment can be distilled down to two foundational elements, as I spoke of earlier.
SS: The act of using now deceased public figures in a brilliant white space also feels post-apocalyptic and otherworldly yet differentiates itself from Noir through aesthetic qualities. Were you thinking about Heaven as a kind of imagined afterlife to your past work, and how does that contrast with the psychological aspects of Noir?
AI: At first glance, Heaven appears ebullient – the logo, the brightness, the celebrities – it’s easy to get swept up in its formal optimism. Many people entered the show with excitement, and it took time for them to realise that each subject’s death was the unifying factor. And this reveal strikes me as somehow melancholic: that what you see isn’t always what you get. Noir works in a similar way – it was marketed as related to the Hollywood crime genre, but it’s actually not about crime at all. It’s about capturing a mood that also slows down the viewer in their tracks then ushers them towards fantasy and magic. Language and experience may or may not align. This is not a pipe, after all.
SS: Your work continues to sit at the intersection of fine art and entertainment. In your world, where everything is aestheticised to such a degree, what do you think about when you think about preserving meaning?
AI: I don’t think about preserving meaning. I strive to create humour and beauty through art objects and experiences, for as broad and inclusive an audience as possible.
SS: Your art walks a delicate line between irony and sincerity – especially in its treatment of branding, identity and desire. Has your relationship to sincerity and how you present a new body of work changed over time?
AI: It’s been the same since the beginning. There is no ironic twist, no cynical wink – there never has been.
SS: Following Noir and Heaven, are there new visual languages, genres or conceptual frameworks you are interested in exploring? What is occupying your creative time right now?
AI: I’ve been working on sunglasses with Oliver Peoples as a fundraiser for LA fire relief [the Los Angeles County Relief Fund]. I’ve also been working on a relaunch of Sun Song, a fragrance that's part of my ongoing collaboration with Louis Vuitton. There are new paintings, sculptures and videos on the way, too – but I wouldn’t want to spoil any surprises!
Sotiris Sotiriou is the founder and director of COMA Gallery, Sydney, Australia.