Exhibitions —

Montréal-based artist Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand’s multidisciplinary practice catalogues a collision of worlds that are equally wondrous and mundane, illustrating the fullness of life’s heartbreak, fantasy, death, and absurdity. She is driven by a respect for the inherent value of all things, resulting in sincere, yet coy, material cohabitations in her sculptural assemblages and drawings. As the artist describes, her work exists for the “most nameable and unnameable things to brush shoulders.”

Language is central to Van Der Donckt-Ferrand’s work, wherein her trilingualism dances through meaning to produce a specific yet capacious written and pictorial lexicon, a personal pop-cosmology. Van Der Donckt-Ferrand’s fidelity to the poetics of drawing can be further understood in the wake of artists like Aloïse Corbaz, James Castle, and Shuvinai Ashoona. For all of these artists, drawing was and is an exposé of rich interior worlds.

For Independent 2025, april april brings new pencil and graphite drawings on colored paper alongside a suite of music boxes featuring composites of original and borrowed songs.

Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand (b. 1995, Montréal, Canada) lives and works in Montréal. She has exhibited at april april, New York; Chris Andrews, Montreal; Bridget Donahue, New York; Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York; Poundmaker Historical Museum, Saskatchewan; The Loon, Toronto; and Antonini Museum, Nasca, Peru. Forthcoming solo exhibitions in 2025 include april april, Pittsburgh (June) and Unit 17, Vancouver (September).