Alexander is a multidisciplinary visual artist working in photography, collage (analogue/digital), painting and drawing, exploring ideas of the body as well as a merging of photography and painting to produce mixed media abstract works on paper. Through a method of gestural abstraction and mark making, taking on influence from an abstract expressionist painting tradition alongside ideas and themes from the surrealist movement, that have origins and roots in pre-colonial African spiritual practices and rituals, he utilises disparate source material through found images (both offline and online) as collage as well as incorporating African symbols and ideograms that are present in sculptural works, textiles, architecture, woodwork and carvings that carry spiritual, cultural and ritualistic meanings.

A coming together of these influences to formulate a hybridised aesthetic begins to materialise in his works, transforming the ways in which African centred aesthetic traditions that have been relegated to 'primitivism' can be utilised in contemporary discourse and located within the canon of modern art. For him, the personal, cultural and political are intertwined, as a means to process through and understand the layered dimensions of simultaneously being a person of both African and queer identity.

www.www.alexanderikhide.com
www.hype-a.com

Images courtesy of the artist @alexander_ikhide