Hand painted and crafted using her own uniquely developed techniques, Alea’s remarkable portraits explore the territory between perception and reality, the virtual and the corporeal. She chooses to represent faces that seem to hold a secret behind the eyes; faces that combine vulnerability with strength and have a story to tell.
Using a range of materials and media, Alea painstaking paints her images line by line, in a loving and lengthy process which combines accuracy and distortion to depict an alternative version of life which has an ethereal, almost mystical effect. At first sight, our perception of the figurative subject is warped by the highly textural nature of the work, but by layering and reinterpreting them with tangible substances – gilding, glass paints, acrylics, epoxy and more, she reconnects us with the everyday.
Alea is fascinated by the insights and mysteries of quantum physics with its suggestion that the universe is undivided and all parts merge and unite in one totality. She is captivated by the idea that physical reality is not as a collection of separate objects as it appears, but instead, is an undivided whole in a dynamic state of flux. This has inspired her to create artistic metaphors reflecting this more challenging view of a very new kind of reality. “My paintings portray the fact that our perceptions of solid reality are as deceptively virtual as everything else in a world that the mind moulds like plastic,” she says.
An Austrian/Turkish Painter born in 1972 in Linz, Alea has been creating artworks from a young age. In 2008 she was offered an exhibition which was a sell-out success and convinced her that the time was right to become a professional artist. Since then, she has been continuously developing radically new and innovative approaches to paintings which mix digital art with what she calls, ‘the real world’. She has private and corporate and public collectors all over the world.
“Looking into and beyond the canvas, I hope we will find new ways to narrate what we see. Each piece has its own narrative, designed to stimulate the audience to reflect on the blurred playground that bridges the visible and invisible, reality and perception. ‘What is reality?’ is the central theme across the series and in each work, we glimpse a fraction of it, before it escapes.”
Show less
