Research Interests
- Intersections of experimental music and the visual arts
- Nineteenth century French and American landscape painting
- Materiality, medium specificity, and markmaking
- Phenomenology and the sensory experience of art
- Art criticism and its historiography
Education
BA, Studio Art & Art History, Bennington College
MA, Art History, The University of Texas at Austin
Bio
Alex Grimley is a doctoral student studying modern and contemporary art with an interdisciplinary focus on Experimental Music and Color-Field painting. His masters thesis, Morton Feldman in Three Senses, explored phenomenologies of silence, scale, and saturation in Feldman’s music and the work of Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, and Donald Judd.
His paper “Newman’s Variety” was presented at the Menil Collection’s exhibition, Barnett Newman: The Late Work, 1965–1970. He is a regular contributor to the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon and has written on Gustave Courbet, Christopher Wilmarth, George Inness, William T. Williams, Torey Thornton, Neil Welliver, and J. Parker Valentine, among others.
At the 2022 Greenhill Symposium, he presented “Bad Taste and the Decade of Excess: Donald Trump in the Culture of Warhol and Olitski.” Recently, he’s written a series of thematic essays and mobile tours for UT Austin’s Landmarks Collection.
His essays on Jules Olitski (2014, 2020), Kenneth Noland (2021), and the Washington Color Painters (2022) have appeared in catalogues for exhibitions at Paul Kasmin Gallery and Yares Art in New York. He is currently working on the catalogue for the forthcoming Jules Olitski Centennial Retrospective.