Alex Da Corte

Designed as a “mutant facsimile” of the 1979 Rijksmuseum/Museum Ludwig catalog for Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing, Mouse Museum is a codex for the eponymous installation by Alex Da Corte (born 1980). Oldenburg’s original installation, created between 1965 and the late 1970s, is a Mickey Mouse–shaped room filled with ephemera the artist collected over the years. Da Corte, a fervent admirer of Oldenburg’s, updates his original concept for the 21st century, using his own collection of accumulated objects including glass fruit, McDonald’s Happy Meal toys and fake flowers. The room itself is shaped like one of Mickey Mouse’s ears: in this case, the left ear, referencing Van Gogh. Documentation, inspirations and reflections presented in the artist’s voice form an unprecedented picture of both an artwork and a holistic contemporary practice. Each object in Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) is photographed for a total of over 300 color images.

In early March 2020, on the cusp of the COVID-19 shutdown, an audience gathered to witness a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s happening, Chicken, by Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte (born 1980). Performed at the site of Kaprow’s original—the Gershman Y at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia—Da Corte’s first live performance reimagined Kaprow’s chaotic event, which had been orchestrated in 1962 under the auspices of the first Pop art exhibition on the East Coast. While the focus of activity for the performers of Kaprow’s Chicken involved the hawking of live and boiled chickens and their eggs, Da Corte’s performers frantically peddled exquisite yellow orbs made from a variety of materials that represented the moon.
Including sketches and reproductions of the objects and costumes constructed for Da Corte’s revision, as well as performance images, scripts, essays and personal accounts reflecting on the event’s impact and significance over the ensuing year, this publication becomes a living document of a moment in time.

This comprehensive monograph celebrates the acclaimed Philadelphia-based installation artist Alex Da Corte (born 1980), famed for his show-stopping 2021 Roof Garden Commission for the Met, As Long as the Sun Lasts. Da Corte’s Day-Glo works are distinctly rooted in traditional American arts and culture—tellingly, as a teenager he planned to become an animator for Disney—and the artist himself often appears in his films, impersonating iconic figures such as Popeye, the Statue of Liberty, Fred Rogers or Eminem. Throughout, the pop flavor of Da Corte’s aesthetics is mixed with a satirical existentialism: his works often combine sadness and effortless play, connecting our sense of self with consumer culture—from the films we watch to the objects we buy, give and throw away.
Published for a major retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and documenting all of his major works to date, Alex Da Corte: Mr. Remember matches the artist’s high-production, ultra-chromatic sensibility in its gorgeous production, with a three-color cloth binding, silver foil on the cover, a paperback volume sewn into the book and an abundance of riotous color throughout, with more than 100 pages of installation views from previous exhibitions.

Published for Alex Da Corte’s (born 1981) 2019 solo exhibition with Karma Gallery, this volume features the eponymous short story by Eugenia Collier, as well as two newly commissioned texts by writer Tausif Noor and animator and historian John Canemaker.

This book exhaustively documents Philadelphia-based installation artist Alex Da Corte’s (born 1980) preoccupation with the musician Eminem across four exhibitions. From Detroit to Cologne, from an artist-run space to a major international museum, Da Corte’s work parallels Eminem’s career through his thirties, reappearing, evolving alongside America, explaining more of himself each time. Eminem’s place in culture and his role in Da Corte’s practice, as well as the larger story of American identity, is explored through recent and commissioned essays by Hilton Als, Charlie Fox, William Pym, Martine Syms and Moritz Wesseler, as well as manipulated found texts and an extensive Q&A with Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth, whose 1982 work Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger strongly informs the discussion. True Life is both an uncompromising reference book and a work of fantasy.

Philadelphia-based Alex Da Corte’s (born 1980) new publication takes its name from the pre-Revolutionary tavern that stands in the heart of Philadelphia’s historic district. Using the “privy,” an archeological pit located near the A Man Full of Trouble tavern, as inspiration, Da Corte presents the world within such a portal; a place where memories, objects, past and present aggregate and reconstitute.