Dima Alekseyev Presents Discarded Identities Opening Exhibition

Dima Alekseyev Presents Discarded Identities Opening Exhibition

Join us for the opening of Discarded Identities, presented by Dima Alekseyev. This in-person exhibition will take place at 3063 Bolling Way NE on September 3, 2026 at 6:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time).

Experience the unveiling of thought-provoking works exploring themes of identity and transformation. The project's concept is a dialogue with Yasumasa Morimura, who eschewed his Japanese identity through European art and transformed himself into iconic Western characters. For four decades, he has methodically dissolved himself into borrowed identities, assuming the faces of Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe and Dürer, inhabiting Manet’s models and Vermeer’s subjects.

Each self-portrait was an act of escape from his own identity: through virtuosic makeup, digitalmanipulation, and flawless staging, he has worn Western art history like a second skin.Dima Alekseev undertakes the reverse journey. Where Morimura layered, Alekseev strips away.Where the Japanese artist cloaked himself in the masks of the Western canon, the Russian artisttears those masks off — layer by layer, literally and metaphorically. For this series, Alekseyev hasinvented a technique in which dried paint peels from the surface and is returned to the canvas —like old skin that remembers its original form. Each canvas is a palimpsest, an archaeology of the face: beneath the accumulated strata of European personae, the contours of who Morimura wasbefore all his transformations begin to emerge.