Whitehot Magazine

April 2025

"The Best Art In The World"

"The Best Art In The World"
April 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Part Two: Run, an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Prager

Portrait of Alex Prager, 2023, copyright Ruben Natal-San Miguel for Whitehot Magazine

By RUBEN NATAL-SAN MIGUEL FEBRUARY, 2023

Photographer Ruben Natal-San Miguel caught up with photographer and filmmaker Alex Prager on the eve of her new exhibition in New York City and the debut of Prager's new film.

Ruben also sat down for a video interview with Prager you can view here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CoNzsOfAAr5

From the press release:

Lehmann Maupin presents Part Two: Run, an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Prager, marking the debut of Prager’s ambitious new film, Run and featuring a selection of new photographs and sculptures. Directly responding to a period of cultural ambivalences and uncertainties, the exhibition urgently examines human perseverance and explores the opportunities for empathy, participation, and action present both within art and everyday life.

Across her practice, Prager crafts rich, often ambiguous narratives that examine the cultural mythologies and archetypes that shape collective existence. As she deploys and deconstructs artistic and narrative conventions, Prager explores how both our senses of self and our engagement with others are often mediated by familiar stories and tropes. Occupying a tenuous relationship to time and place, the artist’s carefully choreographed figures remain suspended between the past and the present, and Prager gestures to a collective will to exist that not only transcends our immediate circumstances but persists despite them.

The foundation for Prager’s latest body of work is the artist’s powerful new film, Run. Featuring musical compositions by Ellen Reid and Philip Glass and starring Katherine Waterston, the film deploys cinematic archetypes and absurdist humor as it examines human resilience in the face of catastrophe. An otherwise ordinary day in an uncannily generic setting erupts into chaos when a massive, mirrored sphere propels itself through a community. Here, forward motion is countered by retrospection. Figures collide into their own reflections in the sphere’s surface, and Prager suggests a curative, collective reckoning with those forces outside of our control.

The New York exhibition presents Run in dialogue with photographs and sculptures that further complicate and enrich the film’s fundamental concerns. Prager’s photographic work Sleep (2022) shows the intricately staged mass of people from Run, as they momentarily lay on the ground, after each colliding with the accelerating mirrored ball. Sleep humorously deconstructs the conventions of the film still, and Prager unveils the absurdist potential of suspending a single moment in time. Dramatizing the scene’s ambiguities, the work offers a narrative with a multitude of possible conclusions. Directly engaging the film’s central image, Prager’s sculpture Ball (2022) shows a hyper-realistic figure of a woman, whose head appears to be crushed by the mirrored sphere. As viewers approach the object, they are likewise confronted by their reflections, and they, too, become enfolded within Prager’s lively narratives. Here, as throughout the exhibition, Prager invites viewers into her visually and symbolically saturated works, suggesting that they, too, have critical parts to play.

Part Two: Run marks the culmination of a multipart exhibition, which also included distinct presentations at Lehmann Maupin Palm Beach in November 2022 and Lehmann Maupin London in January 2022.

The exhibition is supported by WePresent, WeTransfer’s digital arts platform. Additional support is provided by Arts & Sciences and Lavazza Calendar 2023.

Alex Prager, photo by Ruben Natal-San Miguel