Melissa Morgan Fine Art in Palm Desert, California, has added the Southern California artist Alex Weinstein to its gallery program. A lifelong surfer, Weinstein works across painting and sculpture, and the gallery describes his relationship with the Pacific as the foundation of his practice: the ocean is approached not only as a subject but as an immersive physical and psychological space. According to the gallery, his work draws on the traditions of Southern California art while developing a contemporary vocabulary of material, colour and form.
The gallery's introduction centres on the series 'Ocean State', in which Weinstein turns the movement and physicality of water into sculpture. Each piece is formed entirely by hand from polyester resin and fiberglass, the same materials used to make surfboards, and tinted with oil paint, producing undulating, highly polished surfaces of saturated colour that suggest ripples and depth from every angle.
The title has two meanings. Weinstein was born in Rhode Island, known as the Ocean State, so the series refers back to his first home, while also treating the ocean as a 'state' in an emotional, physical and experiential sense. The gallery places these works within the material legacy of the Light and Space and Finish Fetish movements that emerged in Southern California.
Works shown on the gallery's artist page include 'Ocean State', 'Chunk', 'Chunk I' and 'Into the Void'; 'Chunk' combines polyester resin and plywood with oil paint.
Weinstein's work has been exhibited across the United States and abroad, including at Laguna Art Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, MOAH: Museum of Art and History and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and it is held in the permanent collection of Laguna Art Museum.
