Alexis Rockman

In Shipwrecks, Alexis Rockman (born 1962) looks at the world’s waterways as a network by which all of history has traveled. The transport of language, culture, art, architecture, cuisine, religion, disease and warfare can all be traced along the routes of seafaring vessels dating back to and in some cases predating the earliest recorded civilizations.

Through depictions of historic and obscure shipwrecks and their lost cargoes, Rockman addresses the impact—both factual and extrapolated—the migration of goods, people, plants and animals has on the planet.

This timely publication, which includes essays from leading scholars, is propelled by impending climate disaster and the current largest human migration in history, taking place in part by waterway.

With a career spanning over three decades, internationally acclaimed American artist Alexis Rockman is well known for his complex, large-scale paintings and works on paper depicting the collision between civilization and nature. Rockman synthesizes elements of human history, natural science, landscape painting, art history and science fiction with passionate interest in climate change and globalization, to create images that reveal our world balancing on the precipice.
Alexis Rockman: Works on Paper is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s graphic work, documenting his extraordinary accomplishments as a draftsman through a meticulous selection of watercolors, gouaches, oil drawings and field studies. Designed by Tony Morgan in close collaboration with the artist, the book reproduces over 150 works, many of which have never before been published. Included here are his earliest watercolors from the 1980s, often of hybrid and mutated animals; the Field Drawings, created in Guyana and other locations from mud sourced on-site; the ominously beautiful and apocalyptic Weather Drawings; painterly works relating to his epic The Great Lakes Cycle; Wallace’s Line, a visual investigation of the life of scientist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace; and Lost at Sea, his most recent body of work focused on shipwrecks. The book includes newly commissioned essays by Helen Molesworth and David Rimanelli. In addition, it includes a visual appendix of Rockman's graphic influences, with commentary by the artist.
Born in 1962 in New York, where he lives and works, Alexis Rockman has had solo museum exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts (both 2004), the Rhode Island School of Design (2005), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2010), the Drawing Center (2013) and the Grand Rapids Art Museum (2018).

New Mexico Field Drawings is the outcome of a 2017 residency by New York–based artist Alexis Rockman (born 1962) at SITE Santa Fe, and accompanies a 2017–18 presentation of the work at SITE Santa Fe.

In this book, published in a limited edition of 750 copies, the acclaimed New York–based painter Alexis Rockman (born 1962) celebrates the life, ideas and influence of a forgotten founder of the theory of evolution, the Welsh scientist Arthur Russel Wallace, through a series of incandescent and brilliantly executed paintings and watercolors. The eponymous "line" refers to a demarcation between the fauna of Australia and Asia, and Rockman's paintings abound with these animals that struggle for survival on either line of that border. The works are reproduced in the reference style of Victorian explorers' folios, evoking the excitement those adventurers inspired in the popular imagination; likewise reflecting the world of its subject, the cover features a splendid Victorian-style printed gilt cover with marbled endpapers on the inside.

In 1994, American artist Alexis Rockman (born 1962) ventured into the dense jungles of Guyana, the site for this fantastic dreamscape of biological life. Rockman’s world of nature—described by the artist as "zoos in outer space"—is tempered by a penchant for the bizarre and the grotesque, but always based upon intimate observation of the environs. Monumental insects—ants, mites, bees and beetles—vie on Rockman’s vibrant canvasses with anteaters, exotic birds, piranhas and iguanas. Guyana/i> is accompanied by a lively text by acclaimed novelist Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love.