ALEXANDER COSTER SCOTT

Strong ties to Pop, Op, psychedelia, and '60s and '70s graphic design... Scott offered an interpretation of Satie's "wallpaper music"... the new frontier, as painting merges with design.

— Julie Caniglia, ARTFORUM

For this site-specific commission, Boston-based photographer Alexander Coster Scott captured expansive views from One Dalton Street, carefully annotating each photograph.

— Four Seasons Collection

The art lover's journey in Boston begins at Four Seasons Hotel One Dalton Street... A deeper dive into the Hotel's works reveal pieces from artist Alex Katz, Louise Nevelson, Terry Winters, Alexander Coster Scott, and James Stroud.

— Four Seasons Press Release

His rigorous, spare and poetic images are a collision of light and shapes.

— Monocle Magazine

Scott's relaxed environment evokes the elegance and dynamics of space-age pop... celebrating the "Rebirth of Cool."

— Christoph Grunenberg, ICA Boston / Tate Modern

Scott goes back to the future in his work, or maybe forward to the past.

— Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe

What seems like rave culture has more to do with art history... proclaiming a mysterious unknown.

— Matthew Murphy

Art and design are coming together — boundaries between media have been blurred.

— Wallpaper*

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Paul Dietrich Gallery: A Conversation with Coster Scott

“The moment just before recognition holds a lot of energy and potential. My work often blurs the boundaries between disciplines and genres, and in some way my work might raise some questions. With a lot of art—cinema and music included—it’s not necessarily about gaining some special knowledge; rather, it’s more about sustaining a sense of wonderment.” – Alexander Coster Scott

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I was born 1965 in Washington, DC, and have lived in Massachusetts since 1980. In my teens, I decided to become an artist and began selling directly to old New York families and eventually through James Andrew, an interior designer who worked for Albert Hadley. After well-received shows of my painted work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1999 and a one-man show in Sweden soon after, I transitioned more exclusively to large-scale photography. My work over the last 24 years has seen quite a few patrons – notably Tyler Brûlé, who promoted my work in his publications. HP Hood/Catamount Management Corporation is also a standout. My recent photographs also fill Four Seasons One Dalton, a CambridgeSeven partnership project. The works were commissioned through art advisor Kate Chertavian with the support of Richard Friedman (Carpenter & Co.) and the late Henry Cobb.

What type of artist do you consider yourself to be?

I don’t identify with any particular type of artist. My work often blurs the boundaries between disciplines and genres, making it hard to categorize.

Are you formally trained as an artist?

I have a BA in art history from Boston University, where I studied under the brilliant Hellmut Wohl. This provided a crucial launching point for making art. I took art courses in Florence and Rome in the early 80s, as well as courses in oil painting through the Cleveland Institute of Art in the South of France, and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As a teen, I had darkroom classes in photography and grew up surrounded by art and artists. My most useful “applied” education came more informally from exchanges with master artists like William Eggleston, the late William Christenberry, and the late Swiss artist Claude Saucy (who studied under Max Bill). I have a degree in Buddhist studies from the Sakya Institute, a school headed by the Tibetan Buddhist chaplain at Harvard; I include this because it deals with perception at a very fundamental level.

Is there an exhibition, book or image that you remember for the first time really responding to?

Growing up in DC in the 60s and 70s, I was exposed to so much stimulating art. Galleries like IM Pei’s East Building, the Hirshhorn, and the Corcoran, were weekly destinations. I’ve been told that I loved Calder and Rothko even before I could speak. In the late 80s, the great photographer William Eggleston and his eldest son visited my family in DC and they gifted us Eggleston’s book, The Democratic Forest. I treasure that book, now well worn. It was my first realization of photography as a means of deep exploration and a way of life.

If you could go back ten years, what advice would you give yourself?

Aside from the potential dangers of creating paradoxes and temporal complications, I doubt that my younger self would listen to any advice from my future self. One has to find one’s way in the now, however perfectly imperfect.

Tell us about your creative process.

For many creative people, there isn’t a distinction between life and process. That holds for me as well. That being said, I’m best when I’m semi-free from the ordinary anxieties of living – even if those same anxieties become my muses! The main thing is knowing what turns me on and allowing that to manifest in my art. In commissioned situations, I always do parallel bodies of work: something for myself and something for the client. This helps me cope with the pressures of meeting specific expectations. Clients often end up resonating with the work I created for myself!

Has your style changed over the years?

My style is constantly in flux. The temptation is to make something that is recognizably one’s work from across the room, and I see that many artists become siloed in a singular style. For me, style comes as an expression of content, and as such, it changes from moment to moment.

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Excerpt from the essay “Up Against The Wall” by ICA curator Christoph Grunenberg Alexander Scott's “almost already gone” occupies the space diagonally across from Margaret Kilgallen, resulting in an intriguing juxtaposition of disparate directions with surprising formal and philosophical meeting points. Scott integrates graphic symbols into surfaces that celebrate the artificiality of fast-food chains while serendipitously paying homage to the masters of Cubism. Juxtaposing painted wood-grain imitation surfaces and flat squares of pastel color, vinyl laser cutouts of futuristic graphic elements and photographically replicated figurative images, he creates a spatial environment that is as decorative as it is inclusive. Influenced as much by Jean Arp and David Lynch as by 70s "supagraphics" and Techno music, Scott irreverently effaces the boundaries between art, design and architecture. The borders between artistic techniques have become amorphous and the most pertinent ideas today seem to emerge from the productive cross-pollination between disciplines, genres, media and cultures. "For me," Scott states, "art and design are definitely coming together, the boundaries between the various media have been blurred""4° The convergence of stylistic interests in contemporary art and prevalent trends in the world of fashion, style and lifestyle are indicative of a process of "democratization" (often labeled as "vulgarization") which assigns equal validity to a stripe painting by Kenneth Noland and, for example, the decoration of an airport lounge with horizontally flowing stripes in various shades of brown and beige or, maybe, orange and pale blue. Scott's relaxed environment evokes the elegance and dynamics of Space-age pop, Lounge music and Easy Listening. He plays with the architectural definition of sound, reflecting advances in recording and stereo reproduction in the 1950s and 60s that pursued the visual realization of movement and action." Easy Listening music creates both a spatial and emotional atmosphere reflected in synonyms such as "ambient" and "wallpaper music"; the aural equivalent to cocktail lounges, futuristic penthouses or bachelor pads. Scott's clear-cut arrangement of symbols, color and texture celebrates the "Rebirth of Cool" and the optimistic artificiality of a period fascinated by the prospect of space travel and convinced by the progress of technology. "My idea was to create an ambient kind of art, one that wouldn't overwhelm the sense of the environment but had a specific effect." 42 The unlikely resurfacing of musical and design elements from an essentially escapist, affirmative and deeply middle-of-the-road style via Techno, House music and Raves, emphasizes the unpredictability and inconsistency of art history and pop culture. Today, the 60s and early 70s signify a time of deep-felt emotion and upward mobility to a generation that seems to have nothing left to explore. Previously discredited by its tackiness and apparent lack of taste, the period seduces young audiences through its exaggerated synthetic elegance and a sense of worldly refinement. Scott deliberately approaches a decorative environment-defining decoration as the embellishment of the surface of walls and objects without any essential value or structural necessity-which, however, constitutes an effective mode of visual communication. His synthetic wood-grain imitation surfaces are as much a tribute to the artificiality of 60s interior decoration as to Synthetic Cubism's play of reality versus illusion. In the context of wall painting, the faux bois technique functions as a playful reference to Georges Braque who encountered wood-graining first on a piece of wallpaper he bought in a shop in Avignon in 1912 and which led to his first paper collage. The artist might have been also familiar with the wood-grain-ing process through his father, a "peintre-décorateur" or commercial house painter, employing a "low" mechanical process in defiance of conventional notions of painting as an illusionistic and skilled reproduction of the material world.4 Scott's variations on surface and texture emblematically demonstrate the loss of "depth" in postmodern culture and its replacement by "multiple surfaces" From “Up Against The Wall” by Christoph Grunenberg for the exhibition, Frieze, at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston. Grunenberg is now director of the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany after ten years as Director of Tate Liverpool. FRIEZE Wall Paintings by Franz Ackermann John Armleder Margaret Kilgallen Sarah Morris Alexander Scott FRIEZE accompanies an exhibition of wall paintings at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston by five of today's most prominent and promising artists from Europe and the United States. The artists in FRIEZE push the boundaries of painting beyond the frame and investigate its relationship to new media and changing modes of contemporary perception. In their large-scale wall paintings, we find stylistic and thematic references to the deluge of information produced by the electronic media and mass communication and the artifice of advertising and fashion. Intense colors, bold contrasts and dynamic compositions reflect a shared interest in popular culture and its ephemeral manifestations in design, music, film and tele-vision. FRIEZE presents spectacular spatial environments that provoke powerful aesthetic responses competing with the latest developments in digital imaging and virtual reality. Painting in FRIEZE emerges as one of the most advanced artistic media today seductive and sexy, openly visual and physical, unapologetically confident and aggressive, trendy and nostalgic, low budget and high impact, playful and technically accomplished. The recent history of wall painting and the meaning and significance of its revival in contemporary art are explored in a comprehensive essay by Christoph Grunenberg, Curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

For information and art contact:
costerscott@gmail.com