Alex Da Corte: The Party – Art Exhibit

Alex Da Corte: The Party is the world premiere of a major new video installation by celebrated conceptual artist Alex Da Corte (American, born 1980). A feature-length, stop-motion animated opera six years in the making, The Party stands among the most ambitious projects of Da Corte’s career.

Da Corte as an artist transforms the visual language of American popular culture into immersive installations, paintings, sculptures, and videos. Often uncanny and always psychologically complex meditations on identity and mortality, his work layers references from Disney cartoons, television programs, commercial branding, and art history.

Throughout his life,  Da Corte has sustained a fascination with Pop artist Marisol and her work. Like Da Corte, the Venezuelan artist navigated a complex route to the art world in America, replicating her likeness in fragmented and dispersed forms. Marisol bequeathed her estate to the Buffalo AKG upon her death in 2016, and Da Corte, in an essay for the 2023 catalogue the Buffalo AKG produced, Marisol: A Retrospective, dwells on the meaning of Marisol’s mutable, repeating work.

In this work, Da Corte reimagines Marisol’s iconic 1965&66 multi-figure installation The Party as an opera, in which the characters stand in for his own Venezuelan aunts and other family members. Da Corte painstakingly reconstructed the sculptures at one-third scale, often going to great lengths to procure the specific materials Marisol used in her original works. He also created numerous casts of his own face for each sculpture to depict the action and emotion in the opera. 

Alex Da Corte: The Party is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it will travel following its debut in Buffalo. The exhibition is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Artistic Director, Buffalo AKG Art Museum.