Alex Israel: Upside Down | Gagosian Gallery

Israel has built a career out of turning the visual furniture of his native city into art, from sunglasses and stock television backdrops to feature films and self-portraits shaped like his own profile. The fin is his latest recurring motif, and one with a fairly sprawling backstory: it first surfaced in his 2017 surf film, has since appeared on a Louis Vuitton handbag, formed the basis of his logo for the 2028 LA Olympics and Paralympics, turned up on a pair of charity sunglasses made with Oliver Peoves following the LA wildfires, and even inspired the trophy design for this year’s California Arts Council Awards. These new works follow on from a related series shown at Gagosian Rome in 2023, but here the orientation has changed entirely.

By flipping the fins and hanging them overhead, Israel turns a familiar object into something genuinely disorientating. The gesture nods to the physical vocabulary of surfing itself, evoking a wipeout, the moment a board is dragged over the lip of a wave, or simply the underwater view of a board’s fin as a surfer paddles out. With Davies Street’s large street-facing windows, the effect is reportedly closer to standing inside an aquarium and looking up, with visitors cast as the ones submerged.

The polished, semi-transparent finish of the sculptures situates them firmly within a particular Los Angeles lineage. Israel’s high-gloss plastic forms have long been read alongside the Light and Space and Finish Fetish movements that emerged on the West Coast in the 1960s, where artists were similarly preoccupied with industrial surfaces, optical effects and the experience of looking itself. Here, that history is filtered through the bright, upbeat colour palette of surf-brand marketing, all the breezy optimism that Southern California sells to the rest of the world.

There’s a layer of sentiment too: each fin takes its title from a well-loved pop song, lending the works a wistful, nostalgic undertow beneath their glossy surfaces. To accompany the show, Gagosian Quarterly will publish an online essay by Susan Casey, author of a noted book on the science and culture of waves, adding a literary voice to a show that is, fundamentally, about surface, reflection and the pull of the ocean from dry land.

Alex Israel: Upside Down is at Gagosian, Davies Street, London, until 5 September.

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