Alex Pollard
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Pixilated Crowd, 2006
Born: 1977, Brighton
Based: Glasgow
Represented by: Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow
Born in Brighton in 1977, Pollard graduated with a BA in Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 1999 before serving on Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery committee between 2000–2002. Group shows include the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Luhring Augustine, New York, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekshill, USA and the Scottish Pavillion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. In 2006 Pollard had solo shows at The Reliance, London and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, which was followed by a solo at the Talbot Rice Gallery in 2007.
The spare, elegant forms which have characterised Pollard’s recent work are born of bent rationalism and twisted rules, the results of a serendipitous studio practice.
The aleatoric outcomes of the artist’s absorbtion in his materials are nonetheless subject to punctilious processes to bring them into being. These liberating procedures leave the artist trailing in the wake of his Beasts, a master surpassed by his student. Anthropomorphic forms emerge from recomposed detritus only to shimmer and disintegrate once more into inanimate objects, echoing Picasso’s refrain ‘I begin with an idea, then it becomes something else’. Similarly, while Pollard’s somewhat stochastic craft intends the unintentional, the returns of his labour are often beautiful and urbane.
