Alexander de Cadenet

Everyone sees what you appear to be few experience what you really are (Lorenzo the Magnificent) bw version

De Cadenet launched his "skull portrait" concept at The Mark, a warehouse space gallery the artist opened at 259 Kings Road London in 1996. It featured an x-ray of his own skull hanging from the ceiling. Between 1996 and 2016, de Cadenet presented a successive series of photographic "skull portraits", based on X-rays of his subjects' skulls.

In 1998 he presented Skullduggery, featuring skull portraits of fashion models on the exterior of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

In 1999 he presented the complete Celebrity Series at an isolated location outside the Masai Mara in Kenya with the assistance of Cottars Safari. The show was attended by thousands of Masai tribe and some art collectors who flew to Kenya for the opening night.

In 2003 he presented a solo show (British Spies) in both the university and museum buildings of the Courtauld Institute of Art in Somerset house on the Strand, London.

Installation view of Celebrity Skull Portraits at 30 Underwood Street Gallery, Shoreditch, London March 2000.

The ongoing series of works explores the themes of human achievement and the sacredness of art in particular within the tradition of Vanitas.The ten feet high cibachrome photographic Celebrity Series was first presented in the UK in 2000 at 30 Underwood Street Gallery in Shoreditch, London.[3]

The artist has been sourcing the skull x-rays of significant subjects from history who are no longer living for incorporation into skull portraits.[4] As of 2015, he has made portraits of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. In 2016, the artist presented a skull portrait of Richard III in conjunction with Leicester University.[5]

In October 2022 de Cadenet presented within the Saatchi Gallery London with West Contemporary a new series of skull portraits, based on photos taken in 1947 of the remains of the Medici Family within the Michelangelo designed tomb.[6][7] This series was the first skull portraits series the artist had created for seven years and revealed various stylistic innovations, including the use of photos as opposed to x-ray photography, printing on aluminium, incorporating hand painted (and some with glitter) quotes spoken by the subjects or from Machiavelli texts that reference the subjects’ characters and introducing different coloured auras for the subjects. This series specifically explores the facility of art to question the nature of identity and to contribute to the ongoing legacy of the subjects post mortality.[8]

Meteorite Egg, 2017

Between 2008 and 2017 de Cadenet made a small series of castings in certified extra-terrestrial meteorite metal he purchased in Tucson, Arizona. The meteorite works include works that have overt religious symbolism including, The Origin, Hunger and Creation a series of different apples with one, two and three bites taken from them.

A meteorite apple was sold at Philips Auctioneers in 2016 setting a record price for the artist's sculptures at auction.[9] In 2017, he produced Meteorite Egg which is considered the largest casting made of meteorite metal ever made.

In 2016, the artist launched his Life Burger sculptures in California which continued his preoccupation with human ambition, material success and mortality. The works received wide critical acclaim.[10] In 2018, the Sunday Times reported the sale of the unique, 7 inch high, solid silver Trump Burger for £30,000 to a UK collector.[11]

Following his meeting with spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle in 2016, the artist founded the Awakened Artists group of artists which is an international community of artists whose work explores themes around evolving consciousness.[12] In 2017 Awakened Artists co-produced Art Awakens Humanity, a conference at St Stephen Walbrook in the City of London, exploring the relationship between art and spirituality. His interviews with various artists and spiritual teachers have been published in Watkins Magazine, including David Lynch, Eckhart Tolle on Art and the Spiritual Dimension and Eckhart Tolle's Photos of Nature and Alex and Allyson Grey.

He has had two books of poetry published, The Muse in 1999 and Afterbirth in 2015.[13] Both publications explore his experience of the darker side of the female psyche.

In 2016, Unicorn Publishing published Alexander de Cadenet a retrospective of the artists work by art-historian Edward Lucie-Smith.[14]