Alex Couwenberg’s images reflect the cultural trappings of his Southern California roots;
“From Los Angeles, Couwenberg’s work references and suggests the aesthetic associated with mid-century modernism, car culture, skateboards, and surfboards. Not to leave out, paying homage to the historical styles of post-war art making associated with Los Angeles and southern California throughout the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Couwenberg’s paintings give a nod towards the Hard-edge abstractionists, the finish fetish, and the light and space artists. Not content to replicate, he uses the sensibility of Eames-era design and hard-edge geometric abstraction as points of departure for creating paintings. His process, an additive and reductive series of moves and passes, creates multilayered environments that are deep and sensual. He harnesses these ideas into harmonious results, reflecting the visual landscape of his environment.” -bio from mana, the film’s website
At The Claremont Graduate School, Couwenberg was mentored by hard-edge abstraction legend Karl Benjamin whose influence is apparent, albeit as a point-of-departure. Couwenberg has built an dense and extensive vocabulary on the bedrock of the clean, pure and reductive geometric language that Benjamin and his peers utilized during their mid-century era.
‘The photograph that Elliott Erwitt made in 1953 of his newborn daughter and her mother in the family’s modest Manhattan apartment is among the most widely reproduced of its time, having appeared in venues as different as Edward Steichen’s seminal 1955 photography exhibition (and book) “Family of Man,” and in magazines, on postcards and even in drug company advertisements. But if Mother and Child is a mainstay of modern photography, to the mischievous Erwitt, 74, it’s just “a family picture of my first child, my first wife and my cat,” he says. “I still see it as a snapshot. But it happens to be a pretty good one.” -Adriana Leshko, Smithsonian Magazine, August 2002″
“Dijkstra also finds rawness and vulnerability in people who are physically exhausted, such as mothers who have given birth, or matadors who have just left the bullfighting ring. Like the teenagers, their identity is in a precarious state, their exhaustion undermining their ability to pose. In this sense, these pictures are the converse of her photos of teenagers, which capture the making of identity. While the bloodied faces and jackets of the bullfighters remind us of the masculine violence and courage that defines their identity as bullfighters, their tired faces are softened and reveal their fragility as human beings. A similar series features the three naked mothers who have just given birth, and look fatigued and afraid. The hint of roundness in their bellies evokes the image of a saintly pregnant woman, and the way in which they clutch their babies to their chest is evidence of the maternal protective instinct. Yet they have just undergone a monumental change, from being pregnant to being a mother, and the photographs primarily confront us with their fear and exhaustion—rarely associated with the image of motherhood.” -Lauren Vanzandt-Escobar, Rineke Dijkstra’s Retrospective: Identity and the Expressive Fallacy, The American Reader,
The Incubator 