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My name is Alexi K. I am a contemporary artist, based in Birmingham, in the UK. My art is all about abstracting the everyday and speculating the future: architecture, people, diagrams, data, and bright colours. I'm inspired by Cubism, Futurism, Bauhaus and Constructivism. I love straight lines. Enjoy!

Above: ( Variations of ) The Alexi K SUPERHIGHWAY CHAIR, courtesy of Valley Forge Fabrics.

''ABSTRACTING THE EVERYDAY''

[ AIR ] MILEAGE: WORK IN PROGRESS

I just found this unpublished post ( dated 21st April 2017, hence my old logo): It's one of many abstract photo compositions inspired by a stopover at Zurich Airport. Beautiful!

UNDER THE ARCHES: BIRMINGHAM NOIR

The BBC's super-hit show Peaky Blinders is set in Birmingham and more specifically, the streets of Digbeth, which have traditionally been the seat of the local Irish community.  However, thanks to the Luftwaffe in World War II, not much of the old neighbourhoods actually remain, and the production has to film elsewhere in the country. Despite that, the Digbeth area of town, where the music and arts festival takes place, still has a certain cinematic ambience if you can catch it in the right light. Below is a selection of photographs from around my studio.

( Below ) : The Old Typhoo Building, Bordesley Street

( Below ) : Lower Trinity Street

( Below ) : The Custard Factory, Floodgate Street

( Below ) : Lower Trinity Street

( Below ) : Coventry Road

( Below ) : Coventry Road

( Below ) : Electric Supply Station, Upper Trinity Street

( Below ) : Adderley Street

( Below ) : The Custard Factory, Gibb Street

HELLENIC RUINS

Artist's Photographs from September 2018, Paros, Cyclades Islands, Greece

If there's one thing the Greeks are good at, its starting a building and then abandoning it before completion. The example you see here is a particularly striking one, in that it presides over the main coastal road to Paros Kite, the well-known resort populated by kite-surfers during the summer months. The location, size, and assortment of storeys and basements suggests that it was supposed to be a medium-sized tourist hotel, presumably with the intention of capitalising on the influx of surfers from all over the world. I've been going to Paros since the early two-thousands, and it has always been there, ominously occupying a fork in the road like something out of a Stephen King novel. 

To a geometric abstract artist, this kind of structure, with its stark right-angles, exposed staircases and empty voids open to the sky, presents dozens of possibilities for great compositions. It also proves that skilled abstract artists, such as the unknown manual labourers that erected this skeletal structure, exist in all walks of life.

Above: A distinct Rene Magritte atmosphere evoked by the bare structure and blue sky.

Below: A selection of interior shots.

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The experimental piece below was actually inspired by the way in which my iPhone previews the group of photographs in the photo folder.

MY ART IN MOXY DOWNTOWN HOTEL, NEW YORK

DATASTREAM ARABESQUES: ABSTRACT MOSAICS SHOWCASED

IN STYLISH NEW BOUTIQUE HOTEL, MANHATTAN

Above: Photo courtesy of Moxy Downtown.

In the summer of 2017, I was contacted by Kim Edwards, an art director at New York architects STONEHILL TAYLOR. She was interested in using my Polygraph Nudes artwork in a new hotel called MOXY DOWNTOWN, that was being built in Manhattan. For the next few months we went back and forth, but ultimately word came back from the owners that perhaps the art was tonally not in sync with the vibe of the hotel. We tried various tweaks, but the artwork was from a specific time ( they were produced purely during an experimental phase about six or seven years earlier ), and anything that came after it seemed to lack the same spirit. 

When I went to visit Kim in October of that year, I noticed that her design scrapbook included some of my experimental mosaic patterns lifted from this blog, alongside some jpegs of pixelly old-school 'space invader' characters that she'd sourced from elsewhere. Composed entirely of squares, the two different designs looked good together and this greatly excited me because it was an intriguing indication of the direction Kim was going in. ( Continued... )

Below: The DATASTREAM ARABESQUE artworks were also featured in the Birmingham Design Fest's 'Best of Birmingham' exhibition at Allemuir House, curated by Gensler Birmingham. 

It's an interesting process, going back and forth between drawings, paintings and digital. Ways of thinking that evolved uniquely to my painting method, found their way into my digital art process, and vice-versa, and I so was very pleased that these more contemporaneous works had caught Kim's eye.

Below: A visualisation by art director Kim Edwards. The MOXY brand of hotels is about creating a stylish environment for sophisticated millennials 'at affordable prices'. Kim's mood boards indicated to me that I should expect a Scandinavian / Japanese amalgam of natural stone and wood colours, interspersed with cool artworks from a wide range of artists, myself included.

Originally, the process of creating the mosaic designs involved editing, revising and re-composing until each piece balanced correctly - exactly the same method as my paintings. The only difference is that with digital, you can produce dozens of permutations in the same amount of time that it would take to do one painting. 

Below: DATASTREAM ARABESQUES at MOXY DOWNTOWN by Alexi K, photo courtesy of Kim Edwards.

Entitled DATASTREAM ARABESQUES, the artwork was intended to evoke the flow of  information through the matrix of technology that now envelopes our lives. 

Below: DATASTREAM ARABESQUES at MOXY DOWNTOWN by Alexi K, photo courtesy of Kim Edwards.

What's particularly satisfying is that despite the technology and output methods that characterize digital art, its creation was, for me, a completely authentic process of inspiration and abstraction, which luckily received no notes or requests for tweaks from the owners of the hotel. The designs stayed exactly how I had originally made them, before I had even thought about any possible commercial application. I look forward to staying at MOXY DOWNTOWN later this year and seeing the finished project for myself.

Thanks to Kim Edwards and Stonehill Taylor, and also to MOXY HOTELS.

I, VOYAGER ( revisited )

It still amuses me to see where my paintings travel to. As you can imagine, I rarely get to go back and examine the back-catalogue. In fact, I don't even look up at paintings that are on the studio wall right now, because I'm too involved with the latest set of questions posed by the current piece. 

When I do get to see work from a previous collection however, I'm intrigued by the compositional decisions made. Viewed with fresh eyeballs, these visitations from the past can often provide me with solutions to current painting problems. In this instance, I remember how useful it was to divide this up into five columns ( instead of my usual three ), and also how those blocks of cadmium red were useful for providing the barely-contained explosive energy of the piece.

Below: ASTYANAX, currently residing in Brixton, London. Acrylic on canvas.

76cm x 101cm.

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POSTCARD DRAWING 29 / 10 /2018

Abstract Cityscape: Ink on watercolour postcard.

THOUSAND YARD STAIRWELL

While working to promote the Custard Factory Open Studios recently, I experimented on various background designs for the event's own blog wallpaper ( mobile phone viewers are advised to scroll all the way down to the bottom of any of my blogs and click 'view web version' to see the fully-realised designs ). I have a stock of photos from around the Custard Factory buildings, and used simple repetition ( no actual filters ) to create some eerily surreal images.

COME AND SEE US AT CUSTARD FACTORY OPEN STUDIOS 2018!

My Custard Factory colleagues and I at #422custardfactory are opening our studios to the public on Friday 3rd and Saturday 4th August. This will be a great chance for the public to see what's behind the artist's door, and for budding artists or recent graduates to sample studio life. Drop in!

We have a new blog with all the info, click here for details.

'CONCRETE TRILOGY' DEBUTS IN 'BEST OF BIRMINGHAM' 2018

Timed to coincide with Birmingham's inaugural Design Festival 2018, and the opening of furniture manufacturer Allermuir's design show-house in the Jewellery Quarter, the 'Best of Birmingham' show was hosted by the Birmingham Architectural Association, and curated by Mark Kelly and the team at Gensler's Birmingham office.

Featuring myself plus other artists from the Midlands, the exhibition was held during an uncharacteristically hot June ( by UK standards ). 

CONCRETE TRILOGY in the bar of the rooftop event space, below.

The final part of the CONCRETE TRILOGY ( below ) , may still be a work-in-progress, and subject to alteration once the exhibition is taken down.

My artwork was featured in the beautiful rooftop bar in the Allermuir Building in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. Opening Night, below...

...and then two weeks later on presentation night, which happened to be on the evening of the Summer Solstice, the weather was still uncharacteristically Mediterranean...

Below: 9pm June 21st, Birmingham Skyline, taken from the roof of the Allermuir Building.

VECTORS: ARTWORK RECONFIGURED

INSTAGRAM PROMO SAMPLERS START THIS WEEK!

Above: Sample of digital art based on my 'Brazil Mood Painting' ( 2011 ).

I've started an Instagram poster series, highlighting my abstract art. Over time, my paintings developed their own geometric language and style. It's proved very popular, especially with architecture and design companies in the US, so that's why I'm translating many of my compositions into a purely digital form, allowing them to be produced seamlessly, at a large scale, in different configurations on a variety of materials. 

( Scroll down for the link. ) 

Below: Sample of digital art based on my 'Stealth' painting ( 2015 ).

Below: Sample of digital art based on my 'Athini' painting ( 2011 ).

Click here for my Instagram page!

WORK IN PROGRESS [ cont'd from 23rd January ]

As-Yet-Untitled, Acrylic On Canvas, 60cm x 60cm.

PENCILLED IN

As mentioned in the previous post, November's work-in-progress is now out of bounds due to being on display at Custard Factory. This has necessitated starting a new piece before the other is finished. The difference, is that this time I am making pencil shapes first, rather than automatically painting onto the blank grid. Whether this will result in a piece of work that looks significantly different than its two companion pieces is debatable. But at the moment it's a refreshing change to spend longer composing in pencil.

Untitled Work In Progress, Pencil on Canvas, 60cm x 60cm, Dec 2017.

WORK IN PROGRESS (cont'd) DETAIL SHOTS

Work-in-progress, as featured in the SOLSTICE exhibition, currently in the Nomad Room at Custard Factory, Birmingham UK, until February 2018. Curated by Zarina Keyani.

Untitled Work In Progress, Acrylic & Biro on Canvas, 60cm x 60cm, Nov / Dec 2017

WORK IN PROGRESS - DETAILED ANGLE CLOSE-UPS