Snapshots of life: Alex Becker’s graphically-influenced paintings reflect the complexity of change and indicate the dynamic processes behind the signs. From his early years, charismatic ‚artist of living’ Alex Becker has been transforming his personal perceptions into drawings and paintings. His encounter in the late ’80s and subsequent long-term cooperative work with German painter and graphic artist Klaus Stallknecht left an imprint on and intensified his inclination for graphically-influenced painting. Both in the course of his college years and concomitant to his professional life as a graphic designer, Becker was striving to expand his artistic repertoire in trans-regional exchange with artistic personalities (painters, filmmakers/ photographers and theatre actors) throughout the ’90s. The dynamics and mulitdimensionality of Becker’s manifold sources of inspiration have left strong imprints on his oeuvre which, next to his preferential field of work, includes collage, etching, stone sculpture and mixed media. His vividly coloured and pithy pictures are recognizably influenced by photography: Expressively minimalist depictions of motion caught in the moment, like freeze frames extracted from a sequence, render visible the intenseness of the energy flow condensed to evocative shape. To the artist himself, the act of painting is „like dancing“, imbued with vigour and emotions – and thus always genuine. Becker’s focussing on the moment itself draws upon an abundant reservoir of figural motifs, floral structures and abstract colour compositions which open up a dialogue between ‚what has just been’ and ‚what is just emerging’. His works of art thus often seem to be part of narrative image sequences, like fragments of an evolving story. The artist obtains extraordinary translucent colour effects in his puttied-over paintings on dark cardboard, the multiple layers of which evoke an almost haptic materiality. Intrigued by the imaginable behind the visible surface, he keeps experimenting with varying transparent coatings that ask to be deciphered step by step.