Alexandre Diop: Run For Your Life !

18 Sep-1 Nov 2025

PV 18 Sep 2025, 6-8pm

Overview

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents 'Run For Your Life !', a solo exhibition of new paintings by Franco-Senegalese artist Alexandre Diop. This marks the artist's debut solo show at the London gallery.

Diop’s mixed-media works delve into themes of history, metaphorical archaeology and socio-political change. His work explores the relationship between forms, lines and colours, allowing the artist to create powerful visual narratives. Drawing upon his experience as a dancer, musician and visual artist, Diop brings a multidisciplinary lens to his practice, crafting works that are deeply visceral and formally innovative.

Diop's rigorous approach to art-making—what he refers to as object-images—combines found and recycled materials such as scrap metal, wood, leather, and textile remnants with classical techniques like oil painting. The materials are sourced from scrapyards, urban streets and derelict buildings, and then transformed through an intensive process of layering, burning, tearing, stapling and collaging onto wood panels. The resulting works exist at the intersection of painting, sculpture and relief.

Elaborating on his way of creating, the artist says: “I’m looking for risk and experimentation and this is the way that allows me to innovate. I destroy, advance and change. I create hybrid works that follow their own set of rules."

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