Layered Icons

Portraiture has long carried the weight of identity, memory, and cultural imagination. In Layered Icons, Artplex Gallery brings together Alea Pinar Du Pre, Christina Major, and Elise Remender—three artists whose portraits of women reframe the genre through fragmentation, inscription, and stylization. Their works move beyond likeness to reveal layered ways of seeing, where individuality meets cultural memory and presence emerges through form as much as through atmosphere.

Alea Pinar Du Pre approaches the portrait as a reflection fractured across multiple realities. Her figures are composed of shards, layers, and shifting planes that suggest how identity can never be singular. By embedding digital fragments, metallic surfaces, and painterly gestures into a single image, she mirrors the complexities of contemporary life—scientific, historical, and emotional at once. Each portrait becomes a meditation on the multiplicity of self, where recognition is both immediate and unsettled.

Christina Major extends this layering into language itself. Her portraits inscribe personal thoughts, memories, and fragments of dialogue directly into the painted surface, making text inseparable from image. Brushstrokes and handwriting overlap to reveal the coexistence of subject and artist, creating works where identity is read as much as it is seen. The monumental scale heightens this duality: from afar, a unified likeness emerges, but up close, the portrait disperses into gestures, marks, and words that underscore how selfhood is always layered and shifting.

For Elise Remender, stylization becomes its own form of layering. Her Bathing Beauties shimmer with nostalgia, glamour, and cultural memory, evoking the allure of mid-century aesthetics and Old Hollywood. Through pools of light and water, the women in her paintings become icons, their identities shaped as much by cultural narratives as by individual presence. Reflection on water doubles as reflection on history: each portrait resonates with both elegance and distance, suggesting how beauty and identity are constructed within a shared cultural lens.

Together, these artists expand portraiture into a layered encounter with presence and memory. Whether fractured, inscribed, or stylized, the portraits resonate with both intimacy and distance, reflecting the many ways women have been seen and reimagined across time. Layered Icons invites viewers to consider how identity is constructed and remembered—through image, through text, and through the cultural atmospheres that continue to shape the gaze.

Since its establishment in 2018, Artplex Gallery has been a leader in showcasing high-quality, original contemporary art. Located in West Hollywood, the gallery specializes in presenting a diverse spectrum of international artists whose works challenge conventions and captivate the imagination.