Alex Prager: Matinee
Matinee brings together a new body of work by Alex Prager centered on Los Angeles as both subject and psychological landscape. Across these photographs, the city emerges not simply as a place, but as an atmosphere, an unstable terrain shaped by memory, performance, illusion, and projection. Familiar yet elusive, Los Angeles becomes a site where personal histories and collective mythology continuously overlap.
For more than two decades, Prager has developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning photography, film, and sculpture, creating images that exist between dream and reality. Her work is marked by meticulously staged compositions, heightened color, and emotionally charged narratives that feel suspended between cinema and memory. Every element within the frame is physically constructed and captured in-camera, resulting in scenes that appear at once hyperreal and uncanny. Her photographs often feel like fragments of a story remembered imperfectly—intimate, theatrical, and psychologically unresolved.
In this recent series, Prager continues her exploration of perception through the cultural and visual language of Los Angeles. Moving beyond documentary representation, the works investigate the city as a space of contradiction—simultaneously glamorous and fragile, artificial and deeply human. For Prager, who was born and raised in Los Angeles and continues to work there, the city remains an enduring source of tension and inspiration: a place permanently suspended between transformation and reinvention.
Drawing on cinematic references, literary histories, and the visual mythology long associated with Los Angeles, Matinee reflects on the ways narratives are constructed—both collectively and individually. Time operates fluidly within the work, collapsing past and present, fiction and lived experience. Landscapes become stages, figures appear caught mid-performance, and scenes unfold with a quiet sense of anticipation, as though something has just happened or is about to begin.
Throughout the exhibition, Prager explores the emotional space between spectacle and vulnerability, performance and introspection. Her images invite viewers into carefully choreographed worlds that feel both familiar and disorienting, revealing how photography can hold tension between reality and invention. In Matinee, Los Angeles becomes more than a backdrop: it becomes a metaphor for desire, memory, and the unstable nature of perception itself.
About the Author
Alex Prager is an American artist and filmmaker known for her distinctive staged photographs and cinematic works exploring human behavior, perception, and collective emotion. Working across photography, film, and installation, she creates psychologically charged images that blur the line between reality, fiction, and memory. Her practice is recognized for its elaborate mise-en-scène, vivid color, and carefully orchestrated compositions, all constructed practically and photographed entirely in-camera.
Born in Los Angeles, where she continues to live and work, Prager draws deeply from the visual culture and mythology of the city. Her work frequently examines themes of performance, spectacle, vulnerability, and the emotional complexity of everyday life. Over the past two decades, she has exhibited internationally in museums and institutions across the United States and Europe, and her films have been screened at major festivals worldwide. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, and she is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive visual artists of her generation.
Alex Prager: Matinee
From June 11, 2026 to August 14, 2026
Lehmann Maupin – New York – USA
More info:
