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Alex Prager

Part Two: Run

New York

Jan 19–Mar 4, 2023

Photograph by Alex Prager

501 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Lehmann Maupin presents Part Two: Run, an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Prager, marking the debut of Prager’s ambitious new film, Run and featuring a selection of new photographs and sculptures. Directly responding to a period of cultural ambivalences and uncertainties, the exhibition urgently examines human perseverance and explores the opportunities for empathy, participation, and action present both within art and everyday life. 

Across her practice, Prager crafts rich, often ambiguous narratives that examine the cultural mythologies and archetypes that shape collective existence. As she deploys and deconstructs artistic and narrative conventions, Prager explores how both our senses of self and our engagement with others are often mediated by familiar stories and tropes. Occupying a tenuous relationship to time and place, the artist’s carefully choreographed figures remain suspended between the past and the present, and Prager gestures to a collective will to exist that not only transcends our immediate circumstances but persists despite them.

Installation view of Alex Prager at Lehmann Maupin New York
Installation Views: 1 of 5
Photograph by Alex Prager

Alex Prager

Cecily, 2022

Sculpture by Alex Prager

Alex Prager

Pinball Machine, 2022

Photograph by Alex Prager

Alex Prager

Sleep, 2022

Installation view of Alex Prager at Lehmann Maupin New York
Installation Views: 1 of 4
Film still by Alex Prager

Alex Prager

Run, 2022

Sculpture by Alex Prager

Alex Prager

Run, 2022

Photograph by Alex Prager

Alex Prager

The West, 2022

Photograph by Alex Prager

Alex Prager

Mime, 2022

Photograph by Alex Prager

Alex Prager

Mary Suspended Between Heaven and Earth, 2022

Press Highlights

Portrait of Alex Prager

Alex Prager (b. 1979, Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is an American artist, director and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. Prager is known for her uncanny images and films that blur the line between artifice and reality to explore the human condition. Prager has spent over two decades honing her signature style, which draws on traditional movie making techniques from golden-era period styles (like film noir and Technicolor), classical mythology, and the allegorical works of Dutch Renaissance painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brugel. Over time, large-scale productions have become synonymous with her work.

Working simultaneously across film, photography, and sculpture, Prager constructs highly emotional moments that feel like a fabricated memory or dream. Her distinctive use of archetypes, everyday objects, humor, and allegory—along with her signature technicolor facades—allow her to explore dark and complex topics. Existential concerns are central to her practice, including collective and individual identities and the impact of technology on society. Like the psychological works of artists including Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Hopper, Pipilotti Rist, August Sanders, and Bill Viola, Prager’s work invites the viewer to contemplate the human experience by revealing that the extraordinary lurks within the ordinary.

Learn about the artist