Alex_Couwenberg

ALEX COUWENBERG HIGHLINE

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

ALEX COUWENBERG

William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Alex Couwenberg: Highline, September 13, - November 8, 2025, featuring the artist’s newest paintings.

In his latest series, Couwenberg orchestrates an ensemble of color, light, line and texture—each piece a visual improvisation that melds razor- sharp precision with spontaneous intuition. His multilayered canvases pulsate with pearlescent glimmers and atmospheric gradients, where masking, spray techniques and hand - scraped striations reference the sleek contours of ship hulls, car fins and coastal vessels. The forms are in restless motion - shifting, sliding, overlapping - one into the next. Light itself becomes a primary collaborator, dancing across surfaces in harmonic counterpoint to geometric forms and interrupted gridlines.

Couwenberg’s work taps into the visual rhythms of Southern California, where headlights and taillights play a noir contrapuntal beat to sunlight skittering across waves or filtering in gentle patterns through window blinds on a summer morning. In fact, Couwenberg likens his process to navigating a city: full of green lights, stop signs, and unexpected turns. This interplay between control and spontaneity animates the work, producing compositions that simultaneously convey tension and resolution. The resulting pieces are both formally rigorous and emotionally resonant—vivid reflections of an artist deeply attuned to the aesthetics of movement, light, and the layered complexity of memory and lived experience.

Born and based in Southern California, Couwenberg channels the contradictory dialectics of the region: the soft luminosity of

ocean vistas and open sky versus the relentless linearity of urban freeway systems. His method—a reductive and additive layering ritual—recalls an abstract archaeology: excavated textures meet precise hard - edge forms in a personal vernacular built from cultural signifiers and industrial gestures.

A graduate of Art Center College of Design and Claremont Graduate School, Couwenberg studied with Karl Benjamin, a pivotal figure in defining Southern California’s hard - edge abstraction. Other influences are deeply woven into Couwenberg’s practice as well, ranging from the Finish Fetish movement—surfboard, custom - car gloss, resin surfaces created with industrial rigor—to Light & Space’s subtle manipulations of perception. Couwenberg’s work is represented in numerous museum collections, including the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, Lancaster Museum of Art & History, Laguna Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, and the Daum Museum of Art in Missouri. In 2007, he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for painting.

Fastback, 2025, Acrylic & spray on canvas, 66” x 84”

Dear You, 2023, acrylic & spray on canvas, 32“x 30“

ALEX COUWENBERG

Born and raised in Southern California, painter Alex Couwenberg creates works deeply rooted in the visual and cultural elements of his surroundings. Based in Los Angeles, his paintings reflect the aesthetics of modernist philosophy while drawing inspiration from fashion, design, music, architecture, transportation, and the vibrant cultural history of the region. His art also pays homage to the postwar movements that defined Southern California from the 1950s through the 1980s, referencing Hard-edge abstraction, Finish Fetish, and the Light and Space artists.

Couwenberg studied at the Art Center College of Design and Claremont Graduate School, where he worked under Karl Benjamin, a leading figure in the Hard-edge geometric abstraction movement. Benjamin’s guidance was instrumental in shaping Couwenberg’s style, process, and philosophy. As a Southern California native, Couwenberg naturally absorbed this regional sensibility, instilling it with discipline and rigor. Over

time, his paintings matured into a distinct visual language, one that reflects his dedication to craft, process, and the evolving exploration of concepts and techniques.

His paintings have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and are represented in public, private, corporate, and museum collections worldwide.

Notable museum acquisitions include the Long Beach Museum of Art, Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Laguna Art Museum, Crocker Museum of Art, and the Daum Museum in Missouri. In 2007 Couwenberg was awarded the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for his achievements in painting and was recently featured as the subject of Los Angeles based film maker Eric Minh Swenson, which focuses on the artist’s life and studio practices.

ALEX COUWENBERG

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY