Alexandre Diop

Alexandre Diop was born in Paris, France, in 1995, to a Senegalese father. He builds large-scale works from found and discarded materials, scrap metal, wood, leather, textile remnants, animal fibers, and burnt fragments, worked into surfaces that sit between painting, sculpture, and relief. His practice engages themes of ancestry, colonial legacy, diaspora, and social transformation, and his work has been described in relation to Arte Povera for its transformation of everyday and reclaimed material into figuration.

At age 18, Diop moved to Berlin, where he studied dance, scenography, and context at the Universitat der Kunste Berlin (a program he has described as a bachelor's course in contemporary and conceptual dance) while also taking art classes. He later moved to Vienna to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he has been mentored by the painter Daniel Richter.

In 2022, Reiffers Art Initiatives in Paris selected Diop as the "Young Talent" paired with mentor Kehinde Wiley, an association that placed his work alongside Wiley's in the exhibition "La Prochaine Fois, Le Feu" during Paris+ par Art Basel. That same year he undertook an artist residency at the Rubell Museum in Miami, which culminated in the touring exhibition "Jooba Jubba, l'Art du Defi, the Art of Challenge," shown in Miami in 2022 and at the Rubell Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2023. He now lives and works in Vienna, Austria, and is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, Roberts Projects, and Kavi Gupta.

Diop's early critical reception has been shaped largely through institutional validation rather than a long record of published criticism. His selection by Kehinde Wiley for the Reiffers Art Initiatives mentorship program, his residency and touring exhibition with the Rubell Museum, and his inclusion in group shows at the ALBERTINA Modern and Kunsthalle Krems together signal strong institutional interest in his material-driven, historically engaged approach. His 2025 debut solo exhibition with Stephen Friedman Gallery in London marked a further step into established commercial gallery representation. No verbatim assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile; the record instead relies on gallery, museum, and magazine biographical texts.

Diop's auction record is Le Metisse Parisien, which sold for GBP 158,750 (about USD 193,278) at Phillips London's 20th Century and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 12 October 2023, a result that remains his world auction high as of mid-2026. Publicly documented auction results beyond that sale are limited: a second work, L'Ascenseur Social, is reported to have sold for USD 114,300 at Sotheby's New York on 28 September 2023, though this figure relies on a secondary compilation rather than the house's own published result. This short and thin public sales history reflects a still-emerging market concentrated mostly in the primary gallery market rather than the auction room.

Diop is an early-career artist whose market is still forming: he has one clearly documented auction result at a significant level, a short public sales history, and no catalogue raisonne, since none would be expected at this stage of a living artist's career. Collectors should rely on his representing galleries, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Roberts Projects, and Kavi Gupta, for provenance and availability, and should treat any single auction price as an early data point rather than an established trend line, given how few public sales currently exist.