Alexandre Zhu

Alexandre Zhu (1993) spent his childhood between Shanghai and Paris. He graduated from ENSAD in 2018 with an exchange at the School of Visual Art in New York.

Laureate of the Pierre David-Weill drawing prize in 2021 and Prix Dauphine Contemporary in 2022, he was selected for the Artpress Biennale the same year. In 2024, he was nominated as a finalist for the K11 Art Foundation Prize, and participates in SWAB, Paris Internationale, and The Salon by NADA, along with a group show in Zhi Museum (Chengdu).

His work draws its ideas from personal history, as part of the Chinese diaspora, and from the ever-changing environment he grew up in. Focusing on charcoal drawing, the different series navigate between observation of our standardized landscape and nostalgia feelings, questioning both personal and universal themes.

Through a very precise and long process, Alexandre Zhu spends countless hours at the studio to 'sculpt' shapes into his drawings. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, drawing the void, the intangible light, Alexandre is offering an exploration of the unconscious, sometimes by dissolving forms, sometimes by structuring them on canvas or paper. The notion of space is often annihilated and the objectivity of the composition plunges the viewer into a meditative immersion.

"Encounters at the end of time is a series depicting the standardized billboards found in every city in the world. Ordinarily, these panels constitute the support for a massive dissemination of images and language, except that they are left empty here, as always in times of crisis.
Revelation ? Financial crash ? Pandemic ? Bare, these billboards say nothing about their lack of image. At the same time, it is up to the drawing, almost imperceptible and barely touching the surface of the paper, to highlight this silence(...)"
Elora Weill-Engerer, June 2022