Biography
Alexa Lee is a painter and ceramic artist based in Birmingham, AL. She has been featured in multiple exhibitions across the southeast United States, including the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, The Meridian Museum of Art, and the Gadsden Museum of Art. She studied at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and graduated with a BFA degree in 2024.
Alexa’s work focuses on memory and how it imbeds itself into the body and mind. She primarily works in the genre of narrative figure painting in a style influenced by artists of the aesthetic and romantic movements, including James McNeill Whistler and John William Waterhouse. She is also a ceramicist and uses clay to create functional vessels and sculptures that imply narrative within their form and express the fragile nature of the human condition.
Artist Statement
My artwork centers around memory and how it imbeds itself into the body and mind. I express this through figurative paintings of moments that seem unimportant, in which the subjects appear lost in thought or “somewhere else.” The tone of the scene surrounding the figure is dreamlike and gives an impression of deeper emotion than the subject is expressing. I use distortion and lens perspective to emphasize the body of the figure rather than the face, as my work seeks to explore how our bodies hold onto what we remember.
The primary source of inspiration is my own mind and memory, of which the artworks are reflections. My experience growing up as a female in the deep south continually resurfaces in these artworks, along with themes of history, literature, and religion as these are lenses that color how I view the world. I have always been drawn to tactile and physical things, so I work with mediums that respond to my touch. I work with oil paint in a style influenced by art history, particularly the Romantic era. I am also a ceramicist and use clay to create functional vessels and sculptures that imply narrative within their form; these objects symbolize things that are fragile and easily lost in the human condition.
My artwork represents the conflict between the desire to remember and the longing to forget. I depict memory as a blessing and a curse that both the subjects and viewers of my artwork must respond to.