Dan Alva
"Reinventing the art-historical canon for the contemporary audience" - Maeve Doyle, Maddox Artistic Director
From his studio in Miami, Contemporary artist Dan Alva remixes the masters, combining his figurative visual language with bursts of camouflage, stripes and other patterns to create a bold new style of transitional art that is an abstraction of reality.
Born in 1984, Alva grew up in a family of fine artists. Hands-on from a very young age, he spent weekends with his father in the garage, fixing, building and creating. The friend who was always there to document a night out, his love of photography led to a career in first graphic design, then advertising. Today a successful creative director in the industry, his designer’s eye for shape, form and colour is matched by a prodigious talent for painting.
Alva approaches his paintings in the same way as an ad campaign, experimenting with different concepts, sketching, creating mock-ups, researching artists’ histories and thinking about how the works will be photographed, all before picking up a paintbrush. Using meticulously applied oil paint and the same methods as the masters he is remastering, he honours their individual styles while creating unexpected collaborations between artists that make the viewer question Alva’s source material, and what it has become.
Widely shown at art galleries and fairs throughout Florida and the US, Alva has participated in the prestigious Art Miami every year since 2018. He held his first solo show at the Guy Hepner Gallery in New York, also in 2018, returning for a second in 2023. In 2022, Alva’s art formed part of two group shows with Maddox Gallery in London, “Modern Renaissance” and “Post-Pop”. His 2023 online show “Fortune Favours the Bold” is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Maddox.
