For more than two decades, Alex Prager has constructed a world somewhere between photography, cinema, theater, and dream. Born and raised in Los Angeles, the artist is known for elaborately staged photographs and films in which seemingly ordinary moments become charged with psychological tension. Drawing from film noir and Technicolor cinema, classical mythology, and the allegorical worlds of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, Alex Prager creates images that feel like movie stills from films that never existed—or memories of events that may never have happened.
Alex Prager Has Always Made Reality Feel Like a Movie
Alex Prager, artist portrait, photo by Jeff Vespa, 2023, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Alex Prager, “Hidden Hills (Invitation),” 2026, archival pigment print, 59 1/2 x 70 1/2 inches, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Her photographs are meticulously produced in the real world. Alex Prager constructs her scenes physically, orchestrating actors, costumes, props, lighting, and sets before capturing everything in-camera. This process gives her work its particular tension: the images are unmistakably artificial, yet they possess the emotional authority of memory.
That tension has defined some of Alex Prager’s best-known work. Her 2010 short film Despair was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s “New Photography 2010,” marking a significant career breakthrough. In 2013, she presented Face in the Crowd in her first solo U.S. museum exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art. The work transformed the crowd into a psychological theater, with Prager using elaborate staging and a cinematic language to explore isolation, observation, and collective experience.
Her work has since been exhibited internationally, including at the National Gallery of Victoria, The Photographers’ Gallery in London, Fotografiska in Stockholm, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. More recently, Lehmann Maupin presented Part Two: Run in New York in 2023 and Western Mechanics in Seoul in 2024, continuing her exploration of emotionally charged, nonlinear narratives.
Los Angeles Becomes the Subject Again
Alex Prager, “Hidden Hills (Invitation),” 2026, archival pigment print, 59 1/2 x 70 1/2 inches, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
For “Matinee,” currently at Lehmann Maupin in New York through August 21, Prager returns to the city that has been central to her imagination from the beginning. The exhibition brings together four new large-scale photographs, positioning Los Angeles not simply as a physical location but as a psychological landscape shaped by memory, mythology, entertainment, and desire.
In Bonnie Hill (Overlook), a woman sits in a red convertible against the glittering Los Angeles hills at night. The composition has all the ingredients of a classic Hollywood scene, but the narrative remains deliberately unresolved. The overlook becomes a kind of constructed memory: a recognizable Los Angeles image rendered strange through Prager’s manipulation of time, atmosphere, and expectation.
In Ceremony, Prager turns toward Hollywood’s longstanding tradition of theatricality. Characters gather in a carefully composed tableau, while color, costume, and gesture transform the act of dressing for a significant occasion into a performance in itself. The image becomes a meditation on a city whose culture has long depended upon the creation of images—and upon the people willing to inhabit them.
The new series therefore moves beyond depicting Los Angeles. Instead, Prager considers how the city has been imagined, remembered, and repeatedly reinvented. As someone who grew up there and continues to work there, she understands its contradictions intimately: Los Angeles is both real place and cultural projection, a landscape continually transformed by the stories told about it.
Why Alex Prager’s Vision Feels Especially Relevant Now
Alex Prager, “American West (Rehearsal),” 2026, archival pigment print, 42 x 93 3/4 inches, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
“Matinee” arrives at a particularly significant moment in Prager’s career. In March 2026, her debut feature film, DreamQuil, premiered at SXSW Film & TV Festival. The film explores identity, automation, and the question of what makes us human—concerns that extend naturally from Prager’s longstanding interest in the unstable boundary between reality and artifice.
That question feels especially urgent now, when images can be generated, manipulated, and circulated at unprecedented speed. Prager’s work offers a striking counterpoint to this new visual landscape. Her worlds may look impossible, but they are physically constructed. Every gesture, prop, costume, landscape, and expression has been deliberately staged. The artifice is visible, but so is the labor behind it.
At the same time, “Matinee” reflects an industry undergoing its own uncertainty. In Ceremony, the scattered attention of the gathering audience takes on a new fragility as Prager considers the instability facing the entertainment industry that has sustained so much of Los Angeles’s identity.
This makes the exhibition more than a nostalgic return to Hollywood imagery. Alex Prager is examining what happens when a culture built on fantasy begins to question its own future. Her Los Angeles is seductive but uneasy, glamorous but slightly haunted.
With “Matinee” extended through August 21, there are only days left to encounter this latest chapter in Alex Prager’s evolving cinematic universe. After two decades of making photographs that feel like memories from another life, she returns to the city that first taught her the power of the image. Here, Los Angeles becomes less a place than a state of mind: seductive, theatrical, unstable, and forever suspended between what happened and what we remember happening.
Alex Prager, “Ceremony,” 2026, archival pigment print, 59 1/2 x 72 3/8 inches, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Alex Prager, “Bonnie Hill (Overlook),” 2026, archival pigment print, 59 1/2 x 89 1/4 inches, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
