Alex Sutcliffe

b. 1997, Chicago, IL

Nova Scotia-based Alex Sutcliffe is a Zillennial painter and digital native whose work explores the tensions characterizing visual culture today. His approach emphasizes painting’s illusionary qualities through an interplay of textural surface and layering processes. Sutcliffe is interested in painting’s cultural history, as it once offered a portal into grand narratives, using illusion in a way that prefigured Photoshop to reflect the era's desires. He digitally manipulates historical paintings via blurring, smudging and erasing in order to distance them from their original context, shifting the focus to the canvas's surface texture. In the “Figurative Fragments” series, Sutcliffe employs a digital-style layering method by stacking films of paint before cutting out digital-eraser shapes to reveal the paint stratum beneath. The blurred imagery melding into the crisp digital contours of a multi-layered collage evokes stained glass or shattered screens. This method emulates digital Photoshop processes in an innovative use of common painting conventions to highlight the medium's distinct characteristics.

Alex Sutcliffe was born and raised in Chicago before moving to Ottawa when he was eleven. He received a BFA from NSCAD University, Halifax in 2020. Sutcliffe has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally such as Exaltation, PLATO, New York, New York (2025); Falling in Place, Opera Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland (2025); Legacy, PLATO, New York, New York (2024); Prologue, Gallery Sonder, Corona Del Mar, California (2024); Summer 2023 Group Exhibition at Studio 21, Halifax, NS (2023); Modal Strata, Studio 21, Halifax, NS (2023); Nova Scotia Art Bank Acquisitions, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, NS (2022) and Syncing Matter, Studio Sixty Six, Ottawa, ON (2022), among others. Sutcliffe’s work has been acknowledged by awards such as the 2022 Canada Council for the Arts Concept to Realization Grant, 2021 Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant, the Bank of Montréal’s 2020 1st Art! Competition grant and the 2019 Margo and Rowland Marshall Award for Painting. He was also a two-time recipient of the Robert Pope Foundation Painting Scholarship.

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Gallery Exhibitions:

Upcoming, November 2025