Alexis Kersey

Born in 1976 in Mysore. Lives and works in Mysore and Goa

'Alexis Kersey hails from a British family that has resided in the southern Indian city of Mysore for three generations. His childhood was spent in both India and the U.K. while his training in art was anti-institutional and at the squatted knees of commercial sign painters on the pavements of Madras (now rechristened Chennai). A cartoonish vulgarity has been his trademark for a number of years, having established himself with an invented iconography that posited the mystical Indian seer against his more militaristic countrymen or innocent children against insidiously commercialized trends (Hare Krishna Punks, Company School Junkies, Yogic Nuclear Missiles, Spiritualized Sex Slaves, and the like). Kersey’s more recent works have tempered their icons with a confluence of materials: oil painting backgrounds are affixed with inlaid-wood panels, mirrors and enameled glass, framed with carved and painted flourishes. In these works, images, materials and techniques fuse to a theatrical finish, burgeoning on to a perversely decorative amplitude.' Peter Nagy