Andrius Alvarez-Backus

Bio: Andrius Alvarez-Backus is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, assemblage, and painting. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union (2023), and his Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University (2025). He was the inaugural Nicholas Dahl Visiting Artist at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum in 2025. His work has been shown internationally in the museum solo exhibition, “Desastre!,” at the Fitchburg Art Museum (2023), and group shows at Plato Gallery, Fragment Gallery, Black Brick Project, SK Gallery, the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, and Page-Waterman Gallery, among others.

andrius-ab.com
instagram @ann_dree_uhs

Artist Statement: Through the transformation of everyday objects, I amplify their poetic connotations to evoke personal allegories of intimacy, embodiment, and memory. Using mixed media assemblage, my practice interrogates how desire bridges beauty and abjection, and how the semiotics of materials convey cultural meanings.

By recontextualizing relics of my experience as a gay Filipinx-American, I challenge legible inscriptions of identity and disrupt the expectation of hypervisibility often imposed on queer artists of color. My work privileges the hidden, abstracted, and unspoken. I employ dissemblance as a queer survival tactic, keeping private what is often forcibly exposed and exploited.

My sculptures are imbued with the presence of bodies and their places of origin. Pairs and doubles suggest erotic couplings, while their shifting proximities incarnate the longing to unify fragmented relationships, to graft two individuals into one. Household objects—fences, beds, socks—are repurposed into surreal compositions, staging domestic fantasies that facilitate imperfect yet enduring unions. A fetish for texture animates these propositions; I render seductive surfaces in beeswax, soil, sand, and Manila palm leaves. By queering familiar forms, I ultimately question how bodies are made and unmade through ornament, material culture, and intimate entanglements.

Andrius Alvarez-Backus

Tomorrow I'll be a Pretty Boy, 2024
Resin, keratin, collagen, calcium
18' x 3'4", 0.5"
Courtesy of the artist