Alex Israel's Surfboard Fin Sculptures at Gagosian Rome

Alex Israel, the California-born multimedia artist and designer (b. 1982), presents a series of translucent surfboard fins in varied colors at Gagosian's Rome gallery. The installation occupies the oval salon and adjacent rooms, with the fin motif repeated obsessively across acrylic works. The pieces evoke the artist's native surf culture and echo 1960s Los Angeles art movements like Light and Space and Finish Fetish, which explored the interaction of light and space with fetishized objects. The Warholian repetition of a single image suggests an existential horror vacui rooted in the anxieties of past decades, persisting as a formal mannerism. The exhibition is on view in 2023.