Alexander Pittendrigh

The Studio is a solitary place to which the artist retires to research and to speculate, to turn ephemeral ideas into a sublime hobby. Working in the studio I like to think about the idea of the collection as a field of speculation upon which different art historical trajectories may be recast to produce hybrid forms, weaving together differing historical, stylistic and material concerns. The collections of objects, notes and drawings accumulated in those solitary working hours are part of an ongoing project focusing on the highly personal and often arbitrary criteria that govern the classification and presentation of objects within a collection, in particular the creation of decorative ensembles in notionally private spaces and the idea of a personal connoisseurship formed through private collecting habits.

Alexander Pittendrigh completed a degree in painting at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1994 and has since presented individual exhibitions at Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne in 2001 and 1st Floor, Melbourne in 2001, 1999 and 1997. Following his 2002 Australia Council residency at The British School in Rome his work was in included in the exhibition Vanitas at the Rome Opera Theatre. Other group exhibitions include Bootylicious, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne 2001; The Form Guide, RMIT Project Space, Melbourne 2000; Nostalgia for the Apocalypse, Swinburne University Gallery, Melbourne 2000; Gesamtkunstwerk, Lovers Artists Space, Melbourne 1999; Exhumed II, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra 1999; and Chemistry, 200 Gertrude Street, Melbourne 1999. Alexander was a founding member of 1st Floor Artists and Writers Space in Melbourne.