Alexander de Cadenet is a British visual artist whose thirty-year practice explores identity, mortality and contemporary culture through skull X-ray portraiture, painting and sculpture.

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                           His work sits between vanitas tradition, post-pop aesthetics and spiritual inquiry, reframing death as a lens on selfhood, ambition and an inquiry into karmic justice. He was awarded the Lincoln-Seligmann Art Prize in 1992 and studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, graduating in 1996. His practice has received widespread critical acclaim.

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                           His work is informed by the view that artistic practice can function as a form of spiritual evolution, reflecting a progressive unfolding of consciousness through engagement with mortality, identity and perception.

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                           Since 2020, he has titled skull portraits through archetype rather than sitter’s name, removing undue reliance on biography and individual celebrity - to reveal psychological and existential structures of identity. This shift towards anonymisation reframes portraiture away from recognition and toward essence and deeper selfhood.

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                           Balancing humour, irony and visual spectacle with philosophical insight, his work includes solo exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and has also been shown at Mu.ZEE in Ostend, the Beijing National Museum, and within projects at Tate Britain and the Saatchi Gallery.

 

                           He has presented four distinct collections of subjects, drawing from a wide range of both pre- and post-mortem subjects, including anonymized portraits of Winston Churchill, Beethoven, Dante, Tutankhamun, Marilyn Monroe, Einstein, Richard III, Schubert, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Charles V and Cosimo de Medici.

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                           He has worked with a wide range of academics including Professor Sarah Wilson, from The Courtauld Institute of Art, Professor Donatella Lippi from the University of Florence and The University of Leicester geneticists’ team headed by Professor Kevin Schürer, who discovered the DNA of Richard III — this portrait currently hangs on the office wall of the Dean of Leicester University. He also worked with historian Antony Beevor to create a skull portrait of Adolf Hitler for his Historical Subjects series in 2005. A monograph on his work was written by art historian Edward Lucie-Smith in 2016 by Unicorn Press.

 

                           He is currently creating The Final Gathering, an archive of forensic imagery gathered over thirty years, expanding into an ecosystem of digital and physical artworks and narrative worlds, extending his exploration into themes around vanity, legacy and the purposes of art itself.

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“These works act as a celebration of existence while simultaneously questioning the value of worldly endeavour.”

TARNYA COOPER · EX-CHIEF CURATOR, NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

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“De Cadenet’s Skull Portraits re-energise the long histories of the painted vanitas… these will persist long after we become crematorium dust.”

PROFESSOR SARAH WILSON · THE COURTAULD INSTITUTE OF ART, 2010

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“The artist asks us not to consider the cosmic and metaphorical in opposition to the ordinary, but as being part of it, integral to it.”

OLIVER BASCIANO · ART CRITIC ART REVIEW

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“In his skull portraits, de Cadenet is using modern art language and processes to communicate the vital spiritual teaching of death in a way that is relevant to our time.”

PATRICK HOWE · AUTHOR OF THE AWAKENING ARTIST - WATKINS MIND BODY SPIRIT, 2017

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“Like altarpieces, their renderings of physical mortality are allied with a spiritual consciousness, a hint at the immortality of the soul.”

MELANIE MCGRATH, AUTHOR, 2002

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“The Life Burgers offer a sharp critique of the society we live in and yet simultaneously they are luxury objects in their own right.”

EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH, 2016

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“The Life Burger sculptures explore the relationship between the spiritual dimension of art and consumerism and, at their root are an exploration of what gives life meaning.”

REVD JONATHAN EVENS · ARTLYST, 2022

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“When it comes to de Cadenet’s exceptionally lush, louche, seductive, satirical, gorgeous and gold plate ‘life-burger’ sculptures, the problem and the solution are one and the same.”

SHANA NYS DRAMBOT · HEAD ART CRITIC LOS ANGELES TMES · WHITE HOT MAGAZINE, 2018

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"Digital negatives of everyday life have been transformed by the inversion process in such a way as to draw out the profoundly spiritual of those moments for the artist"

RICHARD DYER · EDITOR IN CHIEF THIRD TEXT

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