ALEX ISRAEL
Heaven

Aspen Art Museum
Feb 15 – Mar 16, 2025

At the invitation of AspenOne and Aspen Art Museum, Israel designed the 2024-2025 season lift ticket. Across each ticket, against a luminous skyscape reads the phrase: “Your ticket to Heaven.”

Israel’s exhibition unfolds in a building formerly known as Ruthie’s, stationed at the base of the treasured Ruthie’s Run on Aspen Mountain. Built by Frank Lerner in the early 1980s, the restaurant shuttered in 2001 yet remains extant on the slopes. As Heaven, the entire interior is painted a luminous white and inhabited by over thirty life-size painted portraits of celebrities who have died since the launch of Instagram on October 6, 2010. These images form the basis for the portraits, which are painted upon an aluminum structure that mimics a cardboard cutout. Hyperreal and bodily, Israel’s trompe l’oeil techniques place the work somewhere between an apparition and memorabilia.

For more information, visit the Aspen Art Museum's website.