Alex Garant

Canadian artist Alex Garant is known as the Queen of the Double Eyes and a pioneer of figurative op art. Her signature drawings and oil paintings are portraits that seem to almost vibrate, thanks to her use of symmetry, superposition, and repetition. Garant’s choices in composition and colour are deliberate to achieve her desired effect. Garant notes that “To me, the vibrancy created by the double exposure is more than just an optical illusion. It represents life emerging from a structural setting.” Having survived a heart attack she suffered at just 30 years old, Garant has a keen understanding of what it feels like to experience life emerging again: this event catalysed her decision to pursue art as a career.

Garant uses models, but she says that there is an element of self-portraiture in all her pieces; she is often expressing something about her own life while creating works about our inner and outer selves. Innocence, introspection and evolution are common themes in her work. The pieces can be difficult to view because of the visual effects she employs; Garant is aware that some feel dizzy or even nauseous from looking at the pieces. But it is Garant’s desire to create art that is more than simply “pretty”; noting that people instinctively are drawn to the eyes, she hopes that having to make that effort of processing the images promotes more engagement with the pieces and that viewers will be more affected by what they see.

A native of Quebec, Canada, Garant was born in 1982. Her artist mother always had supplies about, and Garant naturally gravitated toward creating, participating in an art contest at age 5 and taking her first oil painting class at age 7. She studied visual art at Notre-Dame-De-Foy College, but she also had other interests, including history and science. Her work life after graduation was eclectic, including jobs in marketing and advertising; she even had stints as a flight attendant, makeup artist and clown.

While Garant had always kept art supplies around, her desire to make art full time crystallised after her heart attack, which was brought on by a viral infection. This incident provided the opportunity to “start over fresh with everything,” and she committed to doing what she wanted most: to make art full-time. She has said that “time is the only currency that everyone’s running out of,” and recognition of this informs the way she approaches life and the perspective she brings to creating art.

Recently she has turned to making her pieces more complex and abstract; for her spring 2021 show Sweet Dreams at Beinart Gallery, for example, she created pieces chronicling the emotional life of moving through the COVID pandemic and how that impacts one’s sense of time, how one metres out their life in the context of such a transformative world event.

Garant is based in Toronto. Her work has been shown in Canada, Australia, the United States and Portugal; it has also been featured in various magazines and online platforms, including Juxtapoz, Beautiful Bizarre,  Hi-Fructose, Buzznet, The Huffington Post and VICE.

Photo of Alex Garant.

Alex Garant is represented by Beinart Gallery and has had several solo exhibitions at the gallery –3AM Rococo in 2019, Sweet Dreams in 2021 and a two person exhibition with Lukifer Aurelius titled Seeing Between in 2018. She also frequently participates in group exhibitions at Beinart Gallery.

Please contact us if you would like to buy an original painting by Alex Garant or to be notified when we have new available art for sale.

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