Ali Eckert is a German-American artist whose work combines photography and painting to explore the imagery and iconography of American culture. Drawing on subjects such as worn signage, abandoned gas pumps, and everyday consumer objects, he captures the tension between nostalgia, decay, and cultural memory. Through an experimental analogue process of manually transferring pigments onto a variety of surfaces, Eckert creates layered works that balance photographic precision with painterly abstraction.
Eckert’s unique analog process marries photography with painting. With his background as a photographer, Eckert has been experimenting for years the manual transfer of pigments to achieve a handmade finish. He skins the pigmented layer off and onto his canvas, aluminum, paper, or wood. The wet pigments are squeezed, wiped or reshaped while adding acrylic paint.
As part of his process, Eckert photographs every little bit of the object or landscape he's looking to reproduce. Whether a crushed Brillo box, a worn-out gas pump or a broken neon sign in the desert, they all struggle to hang on while simultaneously starting to fade into oblivion. The artist embraces American culture and preserves bits and pieces from vanishing.
Ali Eckert works with mixed media, film and photography in his studios in Berlin and Wisconsin.