Biography & Artist Statement

Biography
Alexis Beucler (she/her) is an American painter. She was born and raised in Florida where she earned a BFA in studio art and BA in English Literature at Florida State University. She holds her MFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of Iowa with secondary focuses in Printmaking and Book Arts. Alexis lives and works in Los Angeles, California where she is a tenure-track visual arts instructor at Pasadena City College.

Alexis has featured work in more than thirty domestic exhibitions across the US in California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota. Solo exhibitions in the midwest include: Harry & Virginia Murray Gallery (2021), Clear Lake Art Center (2022), MacNider Art Museum (2023) and the Blanden Art Museum (forthcoming 2025). She has been published in Studio Visit Magazine and I Like Your Work Podcast. In 2019 she participated in the Grant Wood Public Art Residency focusing on community-centered public art. Since then Alexis has completed 5 large-scale mural projects across the midwest, each spanning over 20 feet.


Artist Statement
The paintings and artist books I make build a world, magical and real, liminal and intersectional. This world explores identity, sexuality, human futility, anxiety, passion, love. Characters repeat, landscapes intertwine, time ebbs and flows. Like memories drifting together in a dream, time isn’t linear but rather fragmented, sometimes circular, and intrinsically subverts traditional narratives.

Bouncing from each tableau, characters discover who they are, what their passions are, on their own terms. As they transform, figures and landscapes merge and camouflage together, shed subconscious cultural systematic ideologies, and hone in on a conscious personal set of values. Currently, this character growth is marked by a physical transition where characters grow long pollinator noses.

I take an interdisciplinary approach to world building. Over the years my work has shifted from rectangular paintings hanging on the wall to amorphous shapes with glitter edges, soft sculptural devices, and most recently, ceramic frames. This shift from rectangular space to fluid space rejects a canonized shape, a conveniently linear ever-present window, easily produced, an after thought; non-rectangular boundaries embrace an organic wobbliness, a puddle portal, a comet’s crashed shadow. This shift from rectangular space to fluid space conceptually represents the shift from compulsory heterosexuality to embracing one’s queer identity.

I use a full spectrum of color that unapologetically celebrates queer joy. This colorful world spills into the viewer’s space with murals and floor paintings, and occasionally, I paint feet that originate from outside the painting’s frame. It is here that I thrust the viewer into the world to challenge gendered standards pushed by society. The work is both deeply personal and yet mysterious– each painting is a glimpse of a moment in time or interaction that loosely builds on other paintings. Patterns, shapes, environments, and characters form a symbolic language revealed through repetition.

My hopes are to excavate the complexities of this Queering of Space— one that's delicate as a butterfly’s wing, constant as the sun, and rooted in mystery.