An infinite moment
Time and its elusive slip through the hourglass of infinity are also energies that pulse through the imagination of the Berlin-based British artist Mark Alexander, whose exquisite series of mother-and-child portraits is forged entirely from grains of sand. Recalling Medieval and Renaissance icons that we are accustomed to seeing glow with religious resplendence, Alexander’s Sand Madonnas (2019) are eerily haunting in their elemental rawness. Delicately etched as if by breath, the tender embraces they capture seem so fragile that even the weakest whisper of a dying prayer could blow them apart. Even their frames are fused from sand. Neither sculpture nor painting, yet both, the series challenges conventional categories and havers between traditional modes of seeing and saying – a recurring aspiration of the art of the now.
Kelly Grovier
