Davis Keller is pleased to present Alex Constable: Other People’s Rooms, on view from June 27 through August 15, 2026. This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo presentation  with the gallery in his hometown of Los Angeles. 

The exhibition brings together a series of paintings that move between personal memory, historical reference, and imagined narrative. Drawing from family photo archives, auction house catalogues, museum period rooms, and collected ephemera, Constable constructs interiors that feel suspended between eras: a grandmother’s dining room, an ornate European salon, or a lavish dinner tablescape become less about documentation and more about atmosphere. 

Though many of the works originate from found or inherited imagery, exploring the reference points through painting allows Constable to loosen their specificity. Before beginning a work, he converts source material to black and white, using it as a framework from which color, light, and mood can emerge independently. Some paintings glow with muted, fresco-like tones while others feel saturated and distinctly staged. Painted entirely in natural light, the surfaces carry a softened luminosity that make each room feel both familiar yet slightly unreachable.

The exhibition’s title, “Other People’s Rooms,” speaks both literally and psychologically. Constable is drawn to the way interiors operate as portraits of their inhabitants: how furniture, decoration, and objects become tools of both connection and separation across generations. In Swedish Supper (2023), the anticipation of a late 17th-century feast privileges theatricality and extravagance over lived experience. Napkins transform into precious artworks, and the tablescape itself—rather than the meal—becomes the focus. Table Setting (2023) captures the artist’s grandmother’s house before her family has crowded the dining room for Christmas dinner. Here, Constable pays homage to his grandmother’s habit of taking photos of her table settings before significant family meals. Rather than a direct representation of a photo itself, the artist infuses personal memories and imagined elements to reinterpret the interior space. 

Constable alludes to different time periods in each of his paintings, yet a similar feeling radiates through this body of work: rooms prepared for gathering, rather than the act of gathering itself, reveal how rituals of display can carry meaning long before people arrive and remain long after they have left. Constable’s paintings do not simply reflect nostalgia, but they highlight the fragile ways we understand identity through the spaces we leave behind.  

Text by Jordan Horowitz

ALEX CONSTABLE CV/BIO


For more information, to arrange a visit, or to inquire about artwork availability, please email info@daviskellergallery.com