Alex Chitty: Mine (midnight), Mine (morning), 2025

In Mine (midnight), Mine (morning), collagraph transfer prints, Alex Chitty transforms imagery from one of the world’s most known paintings, Vincent van Gogh’s Fifteen Sunflowers (1888), into something novel and ethereal. 

Van Gogh wrote to a friend “sunflowers are mine.” The artist’s signature floral paintings—while they failed to sell in his lifetime—are now ubiquitous. Many don’t realize that these works are memento mori, meditations on the passage of time. Within the single vase of Fifteen Sunflowers the artist painted flowers at different stages in their lifespan: half are shown in full bloom and the rest dying. In the new collagraph transfer prints, Chitty offers a further meditation on “expanses of time.” According to the artist, “Each of the two prints represents the same image as it might appear at two contrasting moments." 

Chitty recontextualizes familiar objects to encourage deeper, more conscious ways of seeing. When ideas emerged for a print-based project, the artist sourced a vintage crewel embroidery of Van Gogh's painting from an independent seller on eBay. The unstretched crafted replica was placed face down onto an inked monotype plate. Two visually distinct black and white depictions of van Gogh’s sunflowers emerged through variations of pressure, ink consistency or application, and paper type. After many experiments on the press, the well-known image shed its identity as either a painting or an embroidery when the final ink impressions became a limited edition printed diptych.

Hours, 2025, (figure 1) presents three trays originally used in a photographic darkroom. The coloring in the base of the trays nods to the build up of countless photographic images made within them over time. Oriented vertically, they register first as pictures, before becoming recognizable, functional objects again. Here, as with Mine (midnight), Mine (morning),  Chitty employs objects which hold specific histories from overlapping personal/cultural/societal narratives.  The artist's work often plays with the possibilities of close iteration, as seen in Precedence, 2019, (figure 2) where the images document the hidden labor of a Calder Mobile, (Ghost, 1964) being installed and uninstalled at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

The artist chases projects that, like this one, encourage a closer look at the things we presume to already “know.”. The project spurred a deeper investigation of  van Gogh’s sunflower paintings and his biography, as well as the biology and natural history of sunflowers themselves. Native to North America, sunflowers were grown and harvested by indigenous peoples as early as 3000 BC. In the 16th century the plant was introduced to Europe and grown ornamentally in private gardens before being cultivated for seed oil. Chitty learned that sunflowers host the Fibonacci number sequence and follow the golden mean. She delights in how the final diptych compliments the circadian rhythm of young sunflower buds which trail the sun across the sky from dawn to dusk each day.

The sunflowers were never really entirely “his.”