Alejandro Cardenas

Alejandro Cardenas was born in 1977 in Santiago, Chile. He earned a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in New York in 2000. Before turning to full-time studio painting, he worked as a multimedia artist across illustration, graphic design, and videography, and spent more than a decade as lead textile designer and art director for the fashion label Proenza Schouler. He was also a founding member of Lansing-Dreiden, a New York based transdisciplinary collective that produced music, a literary journal, and artworks.

His paintings and sculptures depict angular, post-human figures inside dense, surreal architectural interiors, a visual language shaped by surrealism, science fiction, and magical realism. Gallery and press materials have placed his base at different points in Los Angeles, upstate New York, and, most recently, Madrid, Spain, reflecting a working life that has moved across cities over the past decade.

Cardenas has been covered in outlets including the New York Times and Vogue, though no verbatim critical assessment could be confirmed for reproduction here. Institutionally, his profile has grown through acquisitions by LACMA and ICA Miami in 2022 and a standing public collection presence at the Albertina Museum, alongside a sustained exhibition history with Almine Rech that has continued into 2026.

Cardenas has shown regularly with Almine Rech since at least 2021, including Alexandria (New York, 2021), Calypso (Paris, 2022), Fantasmi di Primavera at Palazzo Cavanis in Venice (2023), Olympia (Gstaad, 2024 to 2025), and Arachne (New York, 2026), his seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. He has also shown extensively with Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, including the 2022 group exhibition Wish You Were Here, from which two works were acquired that year by LACMA and ICA Miami. His work is also held by the Albertina Museum in Vienna and The Progressive Collection.

His auction footprint is small. Phillips' artist page lists a top recorded price of HKD 508,000 for a work titled Twilight of Classical Data Transfer, sold in Hong Kong on 7 March 2025. Other Phillips results are lower, including The Return (HKD 309,600, Hong Kong) and two London sales, Parodoxa view 9 (GBP 27,720) and Stage Collapse (GBP 25,400), with exact sale dates not confirmed in the sources reviewed; a 2021 sale of Corvid Unit brought GBP 438. Taken together, these results describe an artist with a handful of public sales rather than an established auction track record.

Cardenas has no catalogue raisonne, and his auction history is thin, with only a small number of public sales at modest prices relative to his institutional standing. Verification of a work's history currently depends on gallery and studio records rather than a published catalogue, and his relatively recent institutional acquisitions mean his market is still early in its formation. Collectors should treat any single public sale result as a limited data point rather than a settled benchmark, and should expect his base of operations and gallery relationships to continue to be described somewhat differently across sources as his career develops.