Alexis Schofield

Alexis Schofield is a painter who creates impressionistic compositions based on found photographs, his own personal archive and, more recently, images generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Utilising charcoal drawings, pouring inks and oil painting on raw canvas, Alexis seeks to create meaning through the layering of materials and textures.

Treating every step of the process as its own found image, and then reworking the image in subsequent steps, Schofield enters a dialogue with the canvas, exploring the scaffolding of his image creation techniques.

In his latest body of work, Schofield has been working with AI generation programmes, feeding it images of works-in-progress and prompting the programme to generate different images based on his compositions. This conversation between artist and machine – and the uncanny images that it renders – speaks to the sense of alienation and anxiety that pervades Schofield’s entire body of work.

Schofield’s figures are characterised by their fluidity and allusiveness. As the artist’s work becomes more enigmatic, they are increasingly fragmented and disjointed. These mysterious protagonists are posed awkwardly in domestic spaces, where familiar objects, like a rug or a window, tether the senses, while sudden distortions of perspective or protrusions of colour throw them off.

“I wanted to get this feeling of alienation to come across in my palettes, in my image choice” the artist says, “this feeling of being outside.”

With references as far-reaching as Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Doig and Marlene Dumas, Schofield produces dense, layered paintings that can simultaneously mesmerise and unsettle the viewer. In doing so, he draws our attention to the aesthetic world that floats at the limits of our understanding and in which we are inextricably enmeshed.

Alexis Schofield was born in 1982. He grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. He currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Our Calves Demand a Wolf is his third exhibition, following Impressions (2023) and Feed (2023) at 99 Loop Gallery. His work has been included in a number of group exhibitions, including Sessions at 196 Victoria (2024) and Hot Spell (2023) at 99 Loop Gallery as well as art fairs such as RMB Latitudes (2024) and Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2022 - 2024).

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