alex parrasch

Immaculate Tensions; We’re All Going Up!

June 6 - July 11, 2026

Los Angeles, CA — CMAY Gallery is pleased to present Alex Parrasch in his first solo exhibition at the gallery. Parrasch is a recent graduate of Claremont Graduate University, where he received his MFA and was awarded the President’s Art Award for the 2026 graduating class.

Alex Parrasch (b. 1997, New York, NY) is a visual artist whose paintings and drawings investigate the fragility, resilience, and physical presence of the human body. His work reflects upon the tension and release embedded within anatomical structures—ligaments, joints, muscles, and skeletal forms—while simultaneously transforming these physical references into dynamic and highly stylized visual compositions. Through a language of abstraction rooted in corporeal experience, Parrasch explores the relationship between movement, balance, compression, and expansion.

Parrasch’s paintings are distinguished by radicalized perspectives and spatial distortions that push biomorphic and geometric forms beyond the traditional confines of the canvas. Sweeping lines, fractured planes, and layered contours overlap and intersect, creating compositions that suggest both physical motion and psychological intensity. His imagery often oscillates between representation and abstraction, evoking bodies in states of strain, suspension, collision, or transformation. The result is a visual vocabulary that conveys the power, agility, and vulnerability of the human figure while challenging conventional perceptions of anatomical space.

Drawing from influences that range from contemporary figuration and abstraction to architecture, biomechanics, and graphic design, Parrasch constructs compositions that feel simultaneously controlled and improvisational. His works possess an energetic rhythm in which forms appear to stretch, compress, and rotate across the picture plane, emphasizing the elasticity and instability of bodily experience. Through this process, the body becomes less a fixed subject than an evolving system of forces and relationships.

While grounded in draftsmanship and close observation, Parrasch’s practice ultimately moves toward a more psychological and symbolic territory. The body in his work is not merely depicted, but fragmented and reconstructed into a series of interconnected forms that suggest memory, motion, and emotional tension. This interplay between structure and collapse, control and release, gives his paintings a visceral immediacy and physical intensity.

His work has been included in exhibitions at Good Mother Gallery, CMAY Gallery, SPY Projects, and The Bunker Artspace, among others, and is held in institutional collections including Bennington College, The Bunker Artspace, and Claremont Graduate University.

Parrasch earned his B.A. from Bennington College in 2021 and his M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University in 2026, where he was the recipient of the 2026 President’s Art Award. He lives and works in Claremont, California.