Andrius Alvarez-Backus
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Andrius Alvarez-Backus is a Brooklyn-based artist working across sculpture, drawing and painting. He comes from a Filipino American family of doctors and nurses, and that shows up in his painting process, where he sutures and grafts recycled bedsheets, bandages and old clothing together. His sculptures are made from things he picks up off the street, from scrapyards and thrift stores, sometimes mixed with family heirlooms. He also lifecasts from his own body, usually forgetting to apply release cream, which makes it hurt. His first museum solo, Desastre!, was at the Fitchburg Art Museum, and the work entered their permanent collection. He is currently in residence at Smack Mellon.
Q: Tell us a bit about yourself and your background. How did you get into making art?
A: I'm a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, drawing, and painting. I'm also a queer Filipino American, and I often strive to make work from (rather than about) my identity. I fell into artmaking quite naturally at a young age. As a child, I was always drawing. I drew literally everything I could observe and study, until that became insufficient and I started turning to more surrealist compositions. My parents were incredibly encouraging, so my curiosity took over any and all creative disciplines. I went through a fashion phase, an architecture phase, a special-effects makeup phase, all of which eventually informed my current multimedia practice.
Q: Your sculptures are built from household objects, everyday domestic things. How do you go about finding those materials?
A: One of my strengths as a maker—though perhaps a liability in storage-scarce New York—is a compulsive tendency to collect. I'm always subconsciously seeking objects that resonate with me on some subliminal level.
Many are sourced from the street, scrapyards, or thrift stores, where I'm interested in their prior lives and the traces of use they carry.
These objects come to me with embedded histories that I intervene upon but do not fully erase. In other cases, I use family heirlooms and things of great personal significance. Here, my focus shifts toward site specificity, relational charge, and the temporal dimensions of memory, or how objects mediate connections between individual and collective narratives. Across both modes, my material selection is guided by intuition; I trust that what I gather will eventually find its place within the logic of the studio.
Q: There's something surgical about your painting process, stitching, grafting, working on old bedsheets and bandages. You come from a family of doctors and nurses. How are those two things connected?
A: Like many in the Filipino diaspora, I come from a family of medical practitioners (nurses, doctors, surgeons, pharmacists), which has profoundly shaped my engagement with the body. My painting practice translates medical procedures such as suturing and grafting into formal strategies, while still retaining traces of their clinical origins. This operates as a coded homage to a familial lineage grounded in care, healing, and repair. My palette is similarly derived from the body, drawing on the shifting hues of my own flesh: scabbed, bruised, scarred, inflamed, infected. These chromatic decisions reflect an ongoing attunement to the body's instability and capacity for transformation in the face of trauma or dysregulation. In this way, the work inhabits a space between the clinical and the intimate, where gestures of care become both material and metaphor, echoing the sensibilities embedded in my familial environment.
Q: You lifecast directly from your own body. What is that like?
A: It's a ton of trial and error. Without formal training in lifecasting or moldmaking, I've developed my approach through self-directed study, largely via online resources.
Lifecasting typically requires collaboration, yet my practice is largely solitary, so I navigate the process alone, often contorting my body into precarious positions and remaining still as materials cure. It's physically taxing (and usually painful as I always forget to apply release cream), but integral to the work.
What compels me is the dissonance of encountering my own body as an object. To hold a cast of my hand or foot is to experience a subtle disembodiment, a separation that renders the familiar strange.
Each cast becomes an index of a specific moment, a material record of time and mortality. In this sense, I occupy multiple roles simultaneously: tool and subject, muse and maker. The work emerges from this deliberate collapse of distinctions.
Q: Your first museum solo, Desastre!, was at the Fitchburg Art Museum, and the work entered their permanent collection. What did that moment mean for you?
A: It was a wildly beautiful and entirely overwhelming and perhaps premature moment for me. I had just graduated from college, and in many ways I felt too early in my development for a museum exhibition.
But exhibiting back in my home state of Massachusetts was incredibly meaningful, and the museum staff was simply a dream to work with. And then getting my first major acquisition was a milestone, so
I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for that specific piece. Looking back, I would of course do the entire show differently, but I have lots of love for that period in my creative trajectory and how it pushed me beyond my technical and conceptual limits at the time.
Q: You're mid-residency at Smack Mellon right now. What's been happening in the studio?
A: It's been a truly transformative experience on the heels of graduate school, as it's the first time I've worked independent of an academic institution. Smack Mellon has supplied me with invaluable resources and connections, so I've been trying to seize every opportunity and spend as much time in the studio. While in residence, I created my solo exhibition which was on view at Eli Klein Gallery from
February through May 2026, as well as several pieces for various group shows. Right now I'm trying to prioritize reflection and rest in the wake of rapid production, though, as I feel the need to slow down and think more. So I guess what's happening in the studio at this exact moment is less making and more looking and learning.
