The work of Mark Alexander has long been obsessed with time and with the slow fermentation in cultural imagination of iconic images. For his new series of paradoxically fragile and indomitable portraits, entitled Trümmerfrau (or ‘Rubblewoman’), the British painter excavates from history the forgotten faces of the countless unheralded women who, in the 1940s, helped clear the debris of war-shattered Germany. Using nothing more than hand-winches and their own strength of character, these remarkable individuals attempted to reclaim some recognizable semblance of the towns and cities from which their husbands and sons and brothers had vanished.
