Alex Israel

Known for his long-standing exploration of Hollywood iconography and modes of production, Alex Israel has recreated the crystal egg that sits atop the mantle of the home of Joel Goodson (played by Tom Cruise) in the teen classic Risky Business. An emblem of the 1980s American suburbia of the 1980s, the egg assumes an alien luminescence quality as it looms over the living room where a brief-clad Cruise dances wildly to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.” The egg, in its theft and Joel’s unyielding attempt to recover it unharmed, serves as the film’s principle plot driver.

Alex Israel (1982, California, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Israel received his BA in 2003 from Yale University and his MFA in 2010 from the Roski School of Fine Arts at University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Israel’s works are held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Recent exhibitions include Alex Israel: Lens, LA><ART, Los Angeles (2013); Alex Israel at The Huntington, The Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Garden, San Marino, California, USA (2015); Sightings: Alex Israel, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, USA (2016); #AlexIsrael, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2016); Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings, Jewish Museum, New York, USA (2017); SPF-18, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2018); Waves, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2018); New Waves, Gagosian, Hong Kong, China (2018); As It Lays 2, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York (2019); and Always on My Mind, Gagosian, London, UK (2020).