STECKLY: A precocious talent. PHOTO: Sarah Meadows | ART DIRECTION/HAIR: Ryann Bosetti

Visual Artist

With his flaxen hair and lanky frame, Alex Steckly looks like an extra from a Gus Van Sant film.

But this precocious 23-year-old is a rising star instead on the local art scene. His first solo show, held in October at Fourteen30 Contemporary, was remarkable for its style and immaculate technique. With enamels, masking tapes, and perforated screens normally used in car detailing and sign painting, Steckly created intricately patterned compositions and sculptures that featured painstakingly sanded biomorphic forms receding as if in a shadowbox. The works straddled the line between drama and nuance with a finesse rare for any artist, especially one so young.

A Portland native born into a family of artists and designers, Steckly started painting at 5 and decided at 13 that he wanted to become a professional artist. After graduating from Cleveland High School, he enrolled at Pacific Northwest College of Art. But he dropped out after one year, saying now that, “I wasn’t interested in the academic side of art. I just wanted to be making it.”

He got a big break in 2008, when curator Nathan Howdeshell included two of his paintings in the group show Rad Moon Rising for Deitch Projects, a New York gallery. Part of Deitch’s presence at the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, the show gave Steckly valuable national exposure.

Gallery representation proved elusive, however, until this June, when local gallerista Jeanine Jablonski saw Steckly’s sculptures at Stumptown and offered him a show at Fourteen30. Jablonski says Steckly has long been on her radar, but that the sculptures she saw last summer “catapulted” him forward.

“We’re already planning the next move for him,” she says, “and looking at getting him into larger markets.”

In three months he created the pieces for the show, wisely tempering his surface effects with a restrained color palette.

In 2010 he wants to incorporate fluorescent lights into his works. With an abundance of ideas and the backing of an ambitious gallery, this wunderkind is poised to break out.

—RICHARD SPEER