Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Alex Da Corte
16
Performance Dates
April 20, May 12, June 3, June 25, July 17, August 8
Learn more
Floor 5
Born 1980 in Camden, NJ
Lives in Philadelphia, PA
Alex Da Corte’s ROY G BIV is both a video installation and an ongoing performance. The video set re-creates a gallery in the Philadelphia Museum of Art—the artist’s hometown museum—that houses sculptures by Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957). Da Corte plays four characters in the video: the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968); Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy; Duchamp dressed as the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman; and one of two figures in Brancusi’s sculpture The Kiss (1916), who comes to life via stop-motion animation. The accumulation of color and eventual emancipation of The Kiss is central to this story of love, loss, and transformation.
Da Corte’s cube will be painted a series of single colors by Americo Da Corte, the artist’s brother, a professional housepainter. The performance riffs on John Baldessari’s (1931–2020) video Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977), for which the artist painted the inside of a room one color per day for six days, and brings the emotional labor and color journey of ROY G BIV into the viewer’s space.
ROY G BIV, 2022
Alex Da Corte, ROY G BIV, 2022. Video, color, sound; 60 min., with wood box with back-projected screen, paint, performance, and powder-coated chairs. Courtesy the artist; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles; and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photograph by Ron Amstutz