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
Thesis Exhibition
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
Be With Me (Not Here, Not There Either),
2024–2025
Dried manila palm leaves, pigmented
beeswax, and steel armature
Courtesy of the artist
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Towards a Home For Us, 2025
Pinewood, pigmented beeswax, and confetti
Courtesy of the artist
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Take Me With You, Again and Again, 2025
Sand, soil, LED lights, acrylic, and poplar wood
Courtesy of the artist
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Now and Then There’s a Seat for You, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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Bury Me, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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Looking for My Ribs, 2024
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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Text Me When You Land, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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Cleaning Up After Myself, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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What Would You Have Me Do?, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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We Bring Our Lares With Us, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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We Collect Ourselves, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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Are You Alone Right Now?, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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From Our Home to Yours, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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How Easily We Bruise, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
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All the Time We Should Have Wasted, 2025
Graphite on paper, beechwood nails
Courtesy of the artist
First Year Exhibition
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