ANDRIUS ALVAREZ-BACKUS (he/him; b. Warwick, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture and painting to explore the kinship between subjecthood and objecthood, specifically as it manifests in the queer Filipinx experience. He uses mixed media assemblage to interrogate how the semiotics of materials evoke different poetic associations, personal allegory, and cultural meanings. Weaving between the natural, the biological, and the synthetic, Alvarez-Backus crossbreeds disparate materials to consider how intimacy bridges beauty and abjection, and how bodies are made and unmade through ornament and “thingness." By expressing a queer sense of embodiment without conventional tactics of representation, Alvarez-Backus challenges the ways in which memory, metaphor, and identity are fetishistically bound up in material culture.
He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2023), and is currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University School for the Arts (expected 2025). His work has been shown internationally in group shows at the Fitchburg Art Museum, Black Brick Project, SK Gallery, the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, Page-Waterman Gallery, the Parish Center for the Arts, and Post Office Gallery, among others. His first museum solo exhibition, "Desastre!," was on view at the Fitchburg Art Museum from June through August 2023, where his work is also included in the permanent collection. Recent honors include the Richard Lewis Bloch Memorial Prize, the Martin A. Rothenberg Travel Fellowship, the D'Arcy Hayman Scholarship, and the Quinta Carolina Scholarship.
Alvarez-Backus currently serves as the Design & Marketing Manager at Queer|Art, the New York City-based nonprofit empowering LGBTQ+ artists across generations and disciplines.
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