286. Alexander Koch - Above Before a Cloud

2026
Oil on wood
17.78 x 17.78 cm

Alexander Koch is a contemporary painter whose work explores the unstable territory between memory, dreams and lived experience. His paintings occupy a space that feels simultaneously distant and intimate, using figuration to activate emotional and psychological states in the present. Through a process rooted in conversation between memory and medium, Koch develops characters and environments that exist in shifting, ambiguous relationships with one another.

For Koch, painting is less about fixed representation than about searching for a personal truth — “something akin to the truest form of self”. His approach to figuration mirrors the concerns of abstraction, treating figures and forms as fluid, evolving marks rather than static subjects. Atmospheric landscapes and shapeshifting presences recur throughout the work, creating scenes charged with tension, vulnerability and transformation.

Koch completed a Bachelor's in Fine Art at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (2018–2022) and is currently undertaking an MFA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2025–2026).

Recent exhibitions include Entanglement at ANNEX by The Koppel Project (2026), group presentations at Galleria Objects, London (2025), and exhibitions in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Antwerp and Venice. His work was included in Magnetic Field at Palazzetto Tito as part of the Bevilacqua La Masa programme (2024), as well as Matters of Spirit – Spirits of Matter in Tilburg and the WeArtOpen Finalists exhibition in Venice. He has also participated in a number of printmaking exhibitions in Utrecht alongside established Dutch artists including Charles Donker and Siemen Dijkstra.

Koch was awarded the Jan Roede Award for Best Painter in 2022 and has since received both the Winsor & Newton Bursary and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Painting Scholarship in 2025.