Alexander Motyl

Alexander J. Motyl is professor of political science and deputy director of the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University-Newark. He served as associate director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in 1992-1998. He is the author of six non-fiction books, including Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (Columbia University Press, 2001) and Revolutions, Nations, Empires (Columbia University Press, 1999), and the editor of The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (Academic Press, 2001). He is also the author of two novels, Whiskey Priest (iUniverse, 2005) and Who Killed Andrei Warhol (Seven Locks, 2007).

Tersely styled and quietly rendered, the evolving corpus of Alexander Motyl's work hovers between cityscape, still life, and figures. Inspired by his reverence for the ordinary, Motyl’s most representational work projects the prosaic features of urban architecture. Personalized by the artist through a pictorial and symbolic focus, windows align the artist’s gaze with the viewer’s emotions. In other work, Motyl presents a series of angular, elongated nudes, bottles, and legs braced against starkly simplified landscapes. Through the meditative beauty of such figures, Motyl extends the mood of solitude and introspection of his earlier work. In his most recent work, Motyl offers icon-like paintings of variously shaped triptychs of multicolored bottles on fields of richly textured gold paint.

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