Alexander Racho

Alexander Racho was born in the Philippines in 1978 and moved to Indonesia at the age of three. In 1996, he attended Grinnell College in Iowa studying Fine Arts and Education, then going on to graphic design at the Illinois Institute of Art – Chicago, in 2000. The work at this gallery is representative of his senior work at Grinnell College. He is the originator of this experimental style of ceramic sculpture; no known artists work in the same manner, in the chosen medium. Each piece is a ‘solid thought’-- the physical manifestation of idea and emotion through experimentation.

It is often necessary to destroy a specimen through an intense, empirical form of dissection to approach an understanding of its nature. The parallel can be drawn to the work as the clay was pushed to its physical limits in an effort of the artist it understand the medium of creation and its potential to express creative ideas. Working in a subtractive process resulted in the destruction of many intricate, intensely labored pieces. (It is worth mentioning that both Globe1 and Cube 1 pieces are the only surviving members of their series.)

Each piece is an exploration of balance between space and negative space; what is no longer there is just as important as what exists. Subtracting too often resulted in the destruction of the piece and leaving too much often meant that the piece would be heavy and unbalanced.