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 named a finalist for the K11 Art Foundation Prize, exhibited at the Zhi Museum in Chengdu, and featured at SWAB Barcelona, Paris Internationale, and The Salon by NADA (Paris).
The year 2025 brought key group exhibitions at Victoria Miro (Venice), Art Basel Hong Kong with Gallery Vacancy, and Altman Siegel in San Francisco.

Zhu’s practice is grounded in precise charcoal drawing. Suspended in time, his works echo a sense of permanence that the artist seeks to instill within the medium.
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.

Osillating between figuration and abstraction, Zhu embraces structural contrasts. He sculpts the void, light, and the intangible just as deliberately as the sharp lines of an architectural volume.
Dissolving forms in some works while strictly organizing them in others, he offers an exploration of the unconscious.
By frequently stripping his compositions of spatial references, Zhu pushes the viewer into a quiet, meditative state.