Alex Gardner

Alex Gardner was born in 1987 and is generally described in gallery and museum biographies as raised and based in Long Beach, California, though his primary gallery, Perrotin, lists his birthplace as Los Angeles. He earned a BFA in fine art from California State University, Long Beach in 2011, having switched his focus to art during his undergraduate years.

Gardner's paintings depict anonymous, faceless figures, drawn from his own experience and observation, that he has said are meant to leave room for viewers to project their own identities and narratives onto the scene. His first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Guest Room, opened at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah in 2019. He has since shown with galleries including The Hole, Konig Galerie, New Image Art, and Loyal, and is currently represented by Perrotin. In 2022 he had his first solo institutional exhibition, We All Exist Right Now, at the Long Beach Museum of Art. In 2023 he was one of eleven international artists selected by Dior for its annual Lady Art collaboration. His first solo exhibition in China, Good Luck, was presented at X Museum, Beijing, from December 2023 to February 2024. He continues to live and work in Long Beach.

Gardner has drawn attention less through traditional art criticism than through a rapid sequence of institutional and commercial milestones: a first US museum solo at SCAD in 2019, a first solo institutional show at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 2022, inclusion in the public collections of the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Museo Jumex, and X Museum, and a 2023 invitation from Dior to join its Lady Art collaboration alongside ten other international artists. Writers covering his work, including Another Magazine and Metal Magazine, have focused on the ambiguity of his blank-faced figures as an invitation for viewers to insert their own experience into the scene. No major-outlet critic has yet produced a widely quoted review with exact, independently verifiable wording, so this profile does not attribute any direct quotation to a named critic.

Gardner entered the auction market in late 2020, and his results since have been thin in volume but have grown sharply in scale. His current recorded auction high is USD 170,100, achieved at Phillips New York for the painting Moment, more than five times its USD 30,000 high estimate; the exact sale date has not been independently confirmed. A subsequent Phillips London sale of Fantasyland (Concensus) realized GBP 15,480 on 16 April 2026, well below that figure, a spread that is typical of an artist with only a handful of public sales rather than an established price curve.

Gardner's auction history is short, having begun only in late 2020, and there is no catalogue raisonne, which is typical for an artist this early in his market life; works are best verified through Perrotin and the record of his prior representing galleries. Individual sale results have varied widely relative to estimate, so any single auction price should be read as a data point rather than a trend line. The strongest signal of durability so far is institutional: placement in four public museum collections across three continents and a 2023 fashion-house collaboration, both unusually early validations for a painter still in his late thirties.