Alex Diamond
* born in Lost Vegas, date of birth unrevealed
* photography, installations, collages, drawing, sculpture
Alex Diamond is something like the new superhero of the contemporary art scene. And just like with a real superhero, his audience is unable to tell who is really hiding behind the tentacled and hairy mask. Not tangible as a person and difficult to classify in terms of category or style as an artist, Alex Diamond is a being without countenance, without past – sometimes more fantasy than reality.
In 2004, Diamond first emerged into life with Alex Diamond’s Strange Sofa in the Hamburg art gallery heliumcowboy artspace. Anything that came before is hardly relevant to his art. To date, no one has spoken with him in person or even seen a real picture of him – although Diamond has from time to time appeared in varying embodiments, with a torso repeatedly sporting a mask emblazoned with tentacles and wavy hair.
With the artist being solely concerned with the work itself and not with its presentation – and not with an individual or an artistic personality – it might be more fitting to view Alex Diamond as an aesthetic concept that is subjected to perpetual transformation. As such, Diamond is continually recreating himself through his monothematic projects, slipping into changing roles and also detaching himself from delimiting art categories, genre associations, or techniques. Alex Diamond enjoys the freedom to reinvent himself again and again and to break away from a personality cult that is frequently given strong emphasis in today’s art market. As the artist himself says about the project Being Alex Diamond: ‘I am an artist who lives solely through the art I create – and vice versa. I play mind tricks with visual aids, pleasing at one moment, disturbing in the next. Independent from styles and techniques, I mirror urban life and our constant fight for possession, superiority, survival and love.’
