Neo-Mortalism
Some knots are tied slowly.

ALASTAIR LAAS


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Collections
+ El Gallo
+ Global Citizen
+ ANCPT
+ Omniipresent

 Works
+ Hold On To Me
+ You Must Be
+ Raw Hide
+ Material Memory II
+ Bruxism
+ Dethrone [Lazy Boy]
+ Sado
+ Dogs Body II
+ The Quick & The Dead
+ Caught Up
+ Walk A Mile
+ CondemNation
+ Ciracade
+ Slightly Smiling Face, Disappointed Face, Face Without Mouth
+ Total Auribus Teneo Lupum
+ Vegan Between Meals


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      Statement


      Alastair Laas investigates the logic of systems, not only their pressures and residue, but the patterns, codes, and frameworks that govern us. His practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance.

      Rooted in lived experience across industrial factories, service roles, and corporate cages, Laas brings an embodied understanding of industrial structures, moving beyond biography into the study of structure itself. Through modular assembly, wood carving, drawing, performance, and material interventions, he assembles visual systems that oscillate between constraint and collapse.

      Each work begins by establishing a system which is then ruptured or recomposed. His practice operates like a forensic procedure: identifying the DNA of systems, isolating their symbolic core, and exposing their obsolescence.

      Recurring patterns of material, performance, colour, and mark-making, builds an expansive but minimalist grammar, an architecture that recalls the severity of industrial design, the liberation of unconscious gesture, the complicity of social realism, and the cultural memory embedded in the intersections between them. What emerges is a body of work that is both construction and critique, a study in how systems manipulate far beyond their intended function.



      Bio

      Alastair Laas is a British artist (b.1982, Black Country, England).

      Recent exhibitions and projects include Taking Time: Flatland Projects (Bexhill, UK, 2025), The Digital Quilt - Art In Flux: INDEXprojects (London, UK, 2020), Dear My Little Prince: Korean Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul, S. Korea, 2018 & 2019), Aesthetica Art Prize: York Art Gallery (York, UK, 2019), (H)AKT - Art & Haktivism: Ugly Duck (London, UK), Mayfair Fringe Festival (London, UK, 2018), Overpr!nt: Le Centre de la Gravure et de l'Image Imprimée (Liège, Belgium, 2018), Metaphors & Spatiality: Sichuan University Fine Arts Institute (Chengdu), Wuhouci Gallery (Chengdu), and Studio Complex: Tate Modern (London, UK, 2017 & 2018). Commissioned works for clients such as Google, Arnolfini, Diageo, Mercedes-Benz, HRH The Queen, Sky, Coca-Cola, and Red Bull.

      He was also a finalist for the Artquest SEED Award and the Solo Award at Chiara Williams Contemporary (2018), completed a residency with Arebyte Gallery in London (2018), selected as an Artist to Watch by ArtConnect (2022), and a Top 100 Artist for the Aesthetica Art Prize (2019). A recipient of the David Ward International Award for Innovation in 2018 and shortlisted for Best Moving Image at the Drum Awards (2015). He completed the De La Warr Pavilion x Flatland Studio Programme. He was shortlisted for the Churchill Fellowship, a trustee position at Spike Island, and the High Weald Public Art Commission in 2025. Laas is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London (2026).