Awaiting visitors on Floor 2 is a dreamlike environment envisioned by Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte. Vivid and surreal, Da Corte’s work draws from areas of popular culture, sexuality, violence, cinema, children’s literature, and art and design history. His work feels familiar, yet popular symbols are stretched, shrunken, and softened, inviting us to see things we recognize in new ways and re-evaluate their cultural significance.
Moving image works are often at the centre of Da Corte’s installations. Playing both director and leading actor in his sleekly executed films, the artist morphs into his subjects, fashioning himself into characters like Mister Rogers, Sleeping Beauty, Marcel Duchamp, and the Wicked Witch of the West. By becoming the characters who taught us right from wrong or good from evil, Da Corte challenges us to rethink the stories and protagonists we love or despise.
For MOCA, Da Corte has reimagined his 2018 film Rubber Pencil Devil across several large-scale multicolor rear-projection cubes. This immersive work appears alongside the Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear), a newly realized work and intimate experience that invites viewers into Da Corte’s wildly creative mind. The interior of the structure is dark, with an illuminated vitrine spanning the walls like a film strip. It’s “life as a moving image,” Da Corte notes.
About the Artist
Alex Da Corte lives and works in Philadelphia. His work has been the subject of several institutional solo exhibitions, the most recent being his 20-year retrospective, Mr. Remember, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk, Denmark), 2022–23 and the video survey, Fresh Hell, at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa, Japan), 2023. Da Corte was selected for the Roof Garden Commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) in 2021. Da Corte’s work has been included in prestigious group exhibitions such the Whitney Biennial Quiet as It’s Kept, 2022; the Biennale di Venezia May You Live in Interesting Times (Venice), 2019, and the 57th Carnegie International (Pittsburgh), 2019.
Recent critical writing includes catalogue essays for the international touring exhibitions Marisol: A Retrospective and Ellsworth Kelly at 100. In 2026, with the Whitney Museum’s Meg Onli and Scott Rothkopf, Da Corte will co-curate the first Roy Lichtenstein retrospective in New York in more than 30 years. Da Corte was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
