TOTAH presents Diorama, an exhibition of recent paintings by Alex Sewell. Diorama opens September 5, 2025 and will remain on view through November 1. This is Sewell’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Marking a distinct departure from previous exhibitions, Sewell’s latest body of work takes on a renewed interest in the constructed quality of paintings—both in scale and method. While past works leaned toward intimate, fragmentary scenes, Diorama unveils a more monumental and theatrical sensibility. The porous translucency of Sewell’s brushwork allows viewers to construct their own narratives regarding the tidal shifts happening across each painting. The endgame is to gently navigate dreamlike terrains stippled with clews that draw viewers along.
A painter’s painter, Sewell moves effortlessly between large- and small-scale works, foregrounding painting itself as a medium brimming with unexplored potentials, capable of revealing to different viewers an intimate externalization of their own thoughts, memories, and desires. Whether it’s the panoramic, shadow-soaked landscape of Go back home (2024) or the wonky congeries of objects depicted in Fast car (2023–24), Sewell’s scenes often resemble makeshift bits of paper collaged into place. Alluding to the flatness of childhood illustrations or DIY stage designs, he builds immersive environments—autotelic fictions that nod to the artificiality of their own making.
In Fast car, the graceful patchwork of different styles (alluding to collage, trompe l’oeil realism, and children’s drawing) pours out into a seemingly vast and illimitable blue sky, inviting viewers to look past the objects and listen for indefinable music on the papier-mâché radio dial. The playful disorder of this assemblage is framed by the comedic rigidity of a warped, gilded edge. This same dream logic resurfaces in Go back home, where a ladder emerges from a pit and points toward a silhouetted city beneath the moon—both enticing and inaccessible. The spatial fiction of these works telescopes painting into an invented world with its own repeatable rules.
However recursive or symbolic Sewell’s scenes might seem, their clarity of form resists reduction. These are not puzzles to be solved, but images to dwell on. In Diorama, each picture holds its own. What links them is not narrative or message, but process: a letting-go that yields to painting’s inherent plasticity. They reflect not just how we record the world, but how we continually re-stage it—through memory, through fiction, and through art.
Alex Sewell (b. 1989, Salem, Massachusetts) completed his BFA at MassArt in Boston, Massachusetts, and joined the studios of artists Jeff Koons and Bjarne Melgaard as an assistant sculptor/painter. Sewell’s work is characterized by his use of symbols borrowed from popular, consumer and gaming cultures and his mastery of oil technique. His ability to mimic pixel with oil, or wood grain with fabric weave, sets the stage for a switch between real, imaginative, and digital representations. Sewell has had his work featured alongside Jim Dine’s poetry at Hauser & Wirth, New York. He has exhibited at Blake & Vargas, Berlin, Big Pictures Los Angeles, California, the Museum or Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts, the Danforth Museum, Massachusetts, the Monmouth Museum, NJ, Freight + Volume, Five Myles, and Spring/Break, New York. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Artnet, and can be found in the permanent collections of Enterprise Bank, Lowell, MA and Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts, and the National Gallery of Bermuda, among others. Sewell lives and works in New York.