Lehmann Maupin presents Alex Hank’s first solo exhibition in Asia, featuring a focused selection of five graphite portrait drawings. Executed on locally sourced birchwood collected from the artist’s barn in the Swiss Alps, the works foreground drawing as both an act of construction and an intimate mode of looking. In this presentation, Hank turns inward, concentrating on the human figure as a site where precision, vulnerability, and psychological tension converge.
The medium itself plays a central role in this inquiry. Birchwood lends the portraits a palpable sense of weight and resistance, reinforcing the corporeal presence of the sitters. The pronounced woodgrain, suggestive of human veins, operates not merely as support but as an active compositional ground. In contrast, graphite brings in delicacy and immediacy, retaining the spontaneity of works on paper even at a commanding scale. This interplay between softness and structure mirrors the subtle negotiations of identity, power, and intimacy that animate the drawings. Through this material tension, the figures emerge as self-possessed yet vulnerable. Often absorbed in their interior worlds, they resist full access. Hank’s sustained attention to his subjects is evident; intimacy surfaces as the sitters withhold as much as they reveal, generating a charged space between privacy and the artist’s impulse to observe.
In The Saint in Leather (2025), Hank deliberately applies graphite more lightly to the background, allowing it to remain soft and atmospheric. By contrast, the figure in the center, clad in a leather jacket, is rendered with meticulous precision; each stitch and crease is articulated through sustained, concentrated mark-making. Distinct from the other works on view, it introduces a forested backdrop, recalling the atmospheric tension of René Magritte’s surrealist The Blank Signature (1965), in which a rider and horse are rendered in visual paradox, interwoven with the forest in ways that destabilize spatial coherence.
In The Rise of Rome (2025), the artist draws on Michelangelo’s Pietà, echoing the posture of Christ’s body leaning against the Virgin. Referencing the moment after the Crucifixion, the work subtly reconfigures this iconic devotional scene. By omitting the buttons of the man’s shirt, the artist loosens the image from a fixed historical setting. Instead of grief, the male figure appears suspended in bliss, transforming lamentation into an image of transcendence and quiet exaltation.
Hank cites an additional wide range of influences, from Pablo Picasso’s sustained engagement with his muses, to the haunting imagery of Leonora Carrington, to the quiet intimacy of Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits. Across these references, the act of looking remains central. Each work becomes a site of encounter where empathy, tension, and introspection coexist.
Across the exhibition, Hank invites viewers into an encounter defined less by recognition than by attunement. As observers, we seek clarity, yet the artist resists disclosure, leaving space for mystery and inviting us to look beyond the mask without ever fully uncovering the subject.
About the Artist
Alex Hank (b.1973, Mexico City; lives and works in Switzerland) is a contemporary visual artist known for his ability to merge different styles and artistic disciplines. His work explores the essence of today's society through the representation of the human being capturing the character of the portrayed individual and inviting reflection on issues of power, intimacy, innocence, and other human emotions. Throughout his career, Hank has used a variety of techniques such as photography, painting, sculpture, and drawing and ventured into other disciplines such as acting, music, video, and writing, demonstrating his creative versatility across multiple media. Hank has exhibited internationally with Richard Nagy in London; Eva Presenhuber in Vienna; Groefling Maag in Switzerland; Ramis Barquet and Generous Miracles in New York, and Emma Molina in Monterrey. A solo exhibition is forthcoming at the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art in Istanbul, Turkey in 2026.
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