Opening Reception:
Thursday, March 27th, 2025
6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Chelsea Walls
231 10th Ave, New York, NY 10011
Chelsea Walls is pleased to present Some Dissemblance Required, a solo exhibition by Andrius Alvarez-Backus, in collaboration with Happenings.The works on display take the concept of dissemblance as their point of departure, or the act of disguising one’s true feelings. Through various tactics of abstraction and transformation, the exhibition probes the hidden as a sacred yet often overexposed realm of potential.
In the eight exhibited paintings, the substrate consists of hand-sutured textiles intimately connected to the body: clothing, bedsheets, tablecloths, upholstery fabric, bandages, muscle wraps, and more. By collaging these somatically charged materials, Alvarez-Backus explores traces of intimacy without relying on explicit legibility. The artist’s subtractive process of sanding between layers of paint reflects the show’s central theme of seeking the fugitive, and unveiling the camouflaged.
The accompanying sculptures transform everyday objects—used towels, lawn chairs, window blinds—into personal allegories of desire, embodiment, and memory. These familiar items reside on the boundaries between public and private spaces, and the images fragmented across their surfaces stage domestic fantasies of stillness and leisure. Despite their poetic presence, the sculptures resist clear interpretation, inviting viewers to question the ways bodies are shaped and reshaped through ornamentation, material culture, and intimate entanglements.
Andrius Alvarez-Backus (he/him; b. Warwick, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, assemblage, and painting. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union (2023), and his Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University (2025). He was the inaugural Nicholas Dahl Visiting Artist at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum in 2025. His work has been shown internationally in the museum solo exhibition, "Desastre!," at the Fitchburg Art Museum (2023), and group shows at Plato Gallery, Fragment Gallery, Black Brick Project, SK Gallery, the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, and Page-Waterman Gallery, among others. Alvarez-Backus currently serves as the Communications Manager at Queer|Art, the New York City-based nonprofit empowering LGBTQ+ artists across generations and disciplines.