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Alex Grey
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Alex Grey was born in Columbus, Ohio on November 29, 1953. Alex went to the Columbus College of Art and Design from 1971-3 then studied at the Boston Museum School, 1974-5.
At the Museum School, Alex met his life-long partner, the artist, Allyson Rymland Grey. At their meeting in 1975, an entheogenically-induced mystical experience transformed Alex's agnostic existentialism to a radical transcendentalism. The Grey couple continued to take "sacramental journeys" on LSD, which led to their shared Universal Mind Lattice experience in 1976. From that point forward their artworks would be about sacred interconnectedness.
Inspired by Allyson Grey, and begun in 1979, Alex’s unique series of 21 life-sized paintings, the Sacred Mirrors, take the viewer on a journey toward their own divine nature by examining, the body, mind, and spirit of an individual in the context of cosmic, biological and technological evolution. From 1979-89 Alex developed depictions of the human body that “x-ray” the multiple layers of reality and reveal the interplay of biological and light bodies. Grey’s recent work explores the subject of consciousness from the perspective of “universal beings” whose bodies are grids of fire, eyes and infinite galactic swirls.
Alex’s art has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and in venues as diverse as the album art of TOOL, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana, Time and Newsweek magazines, the Discovery Channel, rave flyers and sheets of blotter acid. Alex and Allyson have collaborated on performance art, live-painting on stage throughout the world, and the “social sculpture” called CoSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, the church that the Grey's co-founded in 1996. The Grey's live at CoSM in Wappinger, New York and in Brooklyn.
Books & Media
Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey, 1990
The Mission of Art, 1998
The Visionary Artist, audio 2000
Transfigurations, 2001
Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, 2002
ARTmind: The healing power of Sacred Art video 2004
CoSM: The Movie 2006
Art Psalms, 2008
Net of Being, 2012
The visionary artist’s brush is a torch leading humanity to a higher ground of meaning beyond materialism.