This fall, Galerie Judin will present its first solo exhibition of Alexander Basil, who was born in Russia in 1997 and subsequently raised in Germany. The 25 paintings in this group of works depict scenes and still lifes that are consistently set in an interior – that of the artist’s Berlin apartment. This interior world is dominated by a kind of clone or prototype – perhaps even an alter ego? It is a bald man with rosy skin, curvy limbs, and an ornate beard. The man is often unclothed, revealing delicate scars on his nipples that testify to a gender reassignment having taken place. We accompany this prototype during seemingly everyday activities: making phone calls, working on a laptop, lying in bed, drinking coffee, and ironing. The objects found in these tableaux are appropriately commonplace. But Basil’s narrational arrangements are by no means mundane or banal – they exaggerate the everyday into the surreal. Irons and sockets are set on fire, one of the prototypes melts, another sheds his skin.

In attempting to peer through this compositional complexity, we ourselves become the observed. For Basil’s images look back. The face of the prototype is found on many of the objects. Banana plants, headache pills, pillows, candle stumps, spilled coffee, electrical outlets, and cigarettes look back at us with a skeptical, almost oppositional gaze. Everything is brought to life. Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke puts it in the 1908 poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, in which the observer of a statue missing its head becomes the observed: “… for there is no place that does not see you.”