About

Alex Unthank is a New York based Artist and Printmaker born in 1987. Unthank received her BA in Visual Art from Sarah Lawrence College in 2009. She studied printmaking at Il Bisonte, Florence, Italy, and trained as a printmaker at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York. She has been a teaching assistant at RBPMW, assisting with Lithography, Etching, Watercolor Monotype and Wood Cut among other techniques. Unthank works in a variety of mediums that encompass traditional printmaking techniques, photography, installation, and sculpture. Her work is often informed by elements of nature and urban landscape. Unthank deals with the aesthetic quality of the surrounding environment and she works from the patterns that emerge from the organic forms she observes in her everyday experience. 

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My work reveals the complexity of the mundane: the idea that we are constantly surrounded by rich visual stimuli. I seek the beauty often ignored in our everyday experience to spark the imagination and further our understanding of the world around us. Patterns emerge from organic forms, the largest and smallest, the molecular and macro, these pieces fit comfortably together. I move through apparent chaos to order and calm in both the internal and external environment.

I am inspired by the juxtaposition of nature versus urban and view the cityscape with the same eye as a natural environment, examining the relationship between man and nature.  I am interested in our impact on the earth. Our presence is felt in how we live, building, demolishing, changing, and also by what we leave behind. The natural and the man-made become the same, continuous and intimately connected. I look to challenge the viewer to see from the inside out, to change perspective and see from up close to far away, from the future to the past.  These dualities are embedded in our world—to understand them is uniquely human.

Printmaking and photography are integral parts of my practice; the technical aspects of both mediums provide guidelines to work within and boundaries to push against. My work lives between the experimental and conceptual and is ultimately a recognition, and perhaps celebration of how we are placed in our world.