Aline Alagem
Aline Alagem (born 1981, Tel Aviv; lives and works in Berlin) holds BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.
Alagem was awarded several support prizes and exchange residency grants, including the School of Visual Arts, New York; the Cité des Arts, Paris; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, after which she started her transition to Berlin. Alagem's work is collected by prominent collections in Europe and the United States.
Aline Alagem’s immersive figurative paintings are a striking and layered celebration of femininity. Her hyperrealist, dense compositions shift from mysterious and dream like, to saturated swamps of sensuality and power. Alagem subjects vary from real life models to iconic muses, and she often junk potions seamlessly “high” female references from mythology and art history with “low” references from pornography and pop culture. By doing so, she challenges the viewers to recognize uniform patterns that narrate and define women’s characters, pleasure and liberty, through time. Sexuality, sensuality and intimacy are both a metaphor as they are realizations of agency, and Alagem flips the traditional structure of power and gaze, when she takes her feminine characters down from their passive male-made pedestal, highlighting their glorious, feeling, sweating, desiring body and mind. Portrait photo courtesy of Aline Alagem studio; artworks photos by Andrea Rossetti.
