Alex Israel’s ‘Heaven’: Art & Celebrity Mourning

The lauded L.A. conceptual artist Alex Israel likes to refract Hollywood’s starlight. In his latest exhibition, opening Feb. 15 in Aspen, he’s exploring the phenomenon of collective mourning over celebrity deaths in the social media age.

“The show is about grief, but also resurrection,” he says of Heaven, which showcases notable figures who have died since the advent of Instagram — including David Bowie, Betty White, Chadwick Boseman, Karl Lagerfeld, Kobe Bryant and Dr. Ruth — photorealistically depicted on thin, lightweight aluminum, as though they’re cardboard-cutout stand-ups in a multiplex lobby.

“It’s about this new phenomenon we have where, when someone beloved in our culture dies, our feeds are filled with tributes and photos for a day or two,” Israel explains of the trompe l’oeil array, conjured with his go-to fabricators at the Warner Bros. Design Studio. “That inundation is its own memory.”

The exhibit space, behind a pearly beaded curtain winkingly riffing on the gates of St. Peter, is a partnered showcase with the Aspen Art Museum in a long-vacant restaurant along a ski run halfway up the industry-favored town’s namesake mountain. (Visitors will need to remove their skis and boards to enter.) “It’s this heavenly environment, overlooking the Earth below,” says Daniel Merritt, the art museum’s chief curator. “This is already an incredibly poignant project. The location adds to that.”

The exhibit’s name and its graphic treatment are themselves an elegiac ode to Heaven, the avant-garde novelty boutique at the Century City Mall that held serious sway in the ’80s with the likes of Brooke Shields, Paul Reubens and Freddie Mercury. “Part of the show is about bringing back a bit of life to this beloved brand and to this abandoned building,” says Israel, whose Noir, a series of moody new L.A. urban landscape paintings at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery, is also on view now through March 22. (The opening brought out the likes of David Geffen, Jane Fonda and Jeff Goldblum.)

Israel adds that it’s been difficult to end the production process. The recently departed, much lamented David Lynch, for instance, would’ve been an ideal fit. So would Shannen Doherty, who died in July. “She and Luke Perry really should be together in Heaven.”

This story appeared in the Feb. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.