Alex Da Corte

Alex Da Corte was born in 1980 in Camden, New Jersey, and is generally described as a Venezuelan American artist, having spent part of his formative years in Venezuela. He lives and works in Philadelphia. His early training included Camden County College and Barnstone Studios in the late 1990s, followed by study in Film/Animation and Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001. He earned a BFA in Printmaking/Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2004 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2010.

Da Corte's practice combines video, sculpture, painting, and large-scale installation, often built from mass-produced objects, candy colors, and references ranging from Looney Tunes to advertising to the history of Pop and Minimalist sculpture. He came up through the Philadelphia gallery and nonprofit scene, including a 2014 collaborative project with Jayson Musson at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, before his 2016 survey Free Roses at MASS MoCA brought wider national attention. He was included in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, curated by Ralph Rugoff, and in the Whitney Biennial in 2022. In 2021 and 2022 he produced As Long As the Sun Lasts for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Roof Garden Commission in New York. Recent survey exhibitions include Mr. Remember at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2022 to 2023 and The Whale at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2025. In 2023 he was named the Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and he has been announced as co-curator, with the Whitney's Meg Onli, of a planned Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the Whitney in 2026.

Da Corte's rise has tracked closely with institutional validation rather than a long auction history. His 2016 survey Free Roses at MASS MoCA drew notice from Boston Globe critic Sebastian Smee, who wrote favorably of his handling of form and color, and was cited by the museum among the year's notable exhibitions. That reading, of consumer detritus and pop iconography reworked into something both seductive and unsettling, has carried through later commentary on his Venice Biennale inclusion, his Metropolitan Museum roof garden commission, and his subsequent museum surveys in Europe and Asia. The critical throughline is an artist treated as a serious inheritor of Pop and appropriation strategies, recognized with a 2023 Rome Prize fellowship, rather than as a market-driven figure.

Da Corte's auction record stands at USD 187,500, set by Night Vision at Christie's New York on May 11, 2021, during the 21st Century Evening Sale, which Christie's press materials cited as an artist record. That result superseded an earlier record of GBP 40,000 (about USD 52,900) for Bandaids with Butterfly, sold at Sotheby's London during Frieze week in October 2017. His public auction history remains thin overall, and his market to date runs primarily through Matthew Marks Gallery and Sadie Coles HQ on the primary side, with museum commissions and biennial inclusion doing more to build his reputation than auction activity.

Da Corte's secondary market remains comparatively thin relative to his exhibition record, with a documented auction high of USD 187,500 set at Christie's in 2021; collectors should still confirm current results directly with an auction house before relying on any single figure. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authenticity should be checked against Matthew Marks Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, and the artist's studio. His strongest signal of durability at this stage is institutional: a Metropolitan Museum roof garden commission, Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial inclusion, and museum surveys in the United States, Europe, and Asia, which collectively suggest a market still forming rather than one already mature at auction.