NEW YORK, NY.- Kasmin announced its representation of Alexander Harrison (b. 1993, Greenville, S.C.) The gallery presented a new work on paper by the artist at Art Basel Miami Beach this past week. Harrison's first solo exhibition with the gallery, Big World, was mounted in New York in January 2023.

Nicholas Olney, President of Kasmin, comments: "We’re thrilled to announce representation of Alexander Harrison, an artist who has emerged as a singular voice in American painting. Combining technical virtuosity and pictorial innovation, Harrison’s interconnected body of work reveals a storyteller’s gift for calling attention to salient details that reveal larger truths."

Edith Dicconson, Executive Director, adds: "On first seeing Alexander’s paintings in 2019, I was immediately captivated by their powerful command of narrative. Mining his personal histories to speak to profound universal truths, Alexander is able to bring a complex universe vividly to life."

Harrison’s enigmatic paintings of dreamscapes and object-symbols blend illusion and fantasy with archetypes from cultural history to render a vivid universe that is at once inviting and inaccessible. Mining his experiences growing up in Marietta, South Carolina, Harrison explores the psychic reverberations of America’s deeply entrenched racism, as well as the role of the artist and the responsibilities inherent in representation. These themes emerge in Harrison’s work through the motif of the Black cowboy, a persona partially based on the artist’s own grandfather. This character recurs as both a proxy for the artistic figure and for the manner in which Black masculinity has historically been stereotyped in popular culture, where representations have routinely lacked nuance. Harrison’s cowboy exists in riposte to these fallacies, offering instead a hero that emanates self-determination, philosophical depth, and sovereignty over his land. Even when the cowboy is absent from Harrison’s compositions, his searching gaze is implied by the perspective of the scenes depicted, allowing us to catch glimpses of his onward journey.

Harrison studied at The Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. He has held solo exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA; Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and NADA Miami, FL. Harrison has been in group exhibitions at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; the Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Germany; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Hesse Flatow, New York, NY; Richard Heller, Los Angeles, CA; 0.0 LA, Los Angeles, CA; Hotel Art Pavilion, Brooklyn, NY; Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Smoke the Moon, Santa Fe, NM, in addition to Kasmin. His work is held in private and public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Hall Art Foundation, North Adams, MA.