ABOUT ALEX DIMERCURIO

Hi Art Lover!

I’m a Wellington-based artist creating immersive, bold, textural abstract realism cloud and seascapes.

In February 2026, my painting Shine Through (image below) was awarded the Gold Award at the Wellington Art Show by Art Shows Across Aotearoa. it was such an incredible honour.

A month earlier another work Horizons That Hold Us Together was chosen as finalist in the Craigs Aspiring Art Prize, Wanaka. And in 2024 my painting Wonderful Wanders won an Award at the Academy of Fine Arts, Autumn exhibition.

I've been an exhibiting artist since 2004, became a professional full-time artist in 2008 after a sold-out group exhibition at Saatchi & Saatchi’s Five Stories High gallery, but have been painting for as long as I can remember. My end of year school graduation work was exhibited at The Dowse Art Museum, in 1990.

My work has always explored the emotional impact of light, movement, and refracting colour in nature, those fleeting moments that shift something within us, often beyond words. 

My current series is called Chasing Light Across Horizons. Through layers of thick bold palette knife techniques, I capture sky and sea in layered, atmospheric paintings that hold both intensity and stillness.

Each artwork begins with a feeling.

Painting becomes a way of making sense of that experience, holding onto it, and giving it form through colour, texture, and light.

Collectors often describe my clouded landscapes as having a levitating presence, revealing new depth and perspective depending on distance and light within a space.

At the heart of my practice is a deep focus on connection. Our connection to nature, to each other, and to ourselves.

Having lived across continents from a young age I’ve developed a sensitivity to the way we seek belonging, identity, and stillness amidst change. This sense of transience and rootedness coexisting is something I return to in my work. 

The vastness of the sky and the ever-changing sea hold this same duality for me. No matter where we are, or who we are, they offer a quiet sense of familiarity, place and connection to all things.

A defining shift in my work came after a few years of travel while sailing and living at sea, where I was brought face to face with the raw force of nature, its volatility (we even got struck by lightening!), its awe, and its humbling scale.

Time moved between moments of breathtaking surreal beauty and periods of chaotic life-threatening uncertainty, and the emotional pendulum swung between them became deeply significant.

It was often the moments after the storm that stayed with me most.

The first promise of light breaking through cloud. The return of colour and warmth across a horizon, bouncing back into the clouds and then amplified in the water. The quiet, steady sense, like a deep relaxing exhale, that everything would be okay again.

The expansiveness of those clouded skies out at sea also felt strangely like home, creating a deep and indescribable sense of connection.

These experiences have become central to my work, shaping how I see and feel the world. My paintings seek to capture that pivotal moment of reassurance, hope, joy and connection.