Alex Bag

Biography

In Alex Bag's ironic performance videos, the artist adopts a series of personae to create droll conceptual parodies. With her signature deadpan delivery and deliberately low-tech style, Bag mixes the vernacular of pop culture with irreverently humorous monologues. Performing in multiple guises amidst fragments of pop detritus, Bag skewers the tropes of consumer and media culture. Questioning how we define ourselves in relation to television, fashion, advertising and the artworld, she creates mediated parodies that teeter between celebration and critique. EAI is pleased to be making available, for the first time, Bag's body of video works from the 1990s and 2000s.

Alex Bag was born in New York in 1969. She received her BFA from Cooper Union. She has been a lecturer at Yale University, Parsons School of Design, Cal Arts, and The Getty Research Institute. Her first solo New York museum presentation opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Janaury 2009. She has also had solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; The Łaźnia (Bathhouse) Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, Poland; Zaal de Unie, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, and 303 Gallery, New York, among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, at venues including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Centre d'art contemporain Saint-Geneve, Geneva; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York, and Pitti Immagine, Florence, Italy, among may others. In 1996 she was a Visiting Artist at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand. She has performed at The Knitting Factory and Threadwaxing Space, New York, among others.

In 2011, a solo show of Alex Bag's work opened at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. In conjunction with this exhibition the first monograph of her work, entitled Alex Bag, was published.

Alex Bag lives in New Jersey.