Ace Artist-in-Residence with Alex Yudzon

Ace Artist in Residence program, curated in partnership with collectives and institutions that inspire us, provides time to think and space to create. Every quarter, we invite artists across the globe to turn one of our hotel rooms into their studio for a month, then showcase the resulting body of work with the Ace community. In May, we welcome the last artist of the 2025 cycle – Alex Yudzon. 

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Alex Yudzon is a New York-based visual artist whose work blurs the line between photography, painting, sculpture and performance. Creating autonomous photographs from site specific installations and studio based still lifes, Yudzon’s work draws attention to the way we construct personal space within the context of the modern world. 

Yudzon  began photographing in hotel rooms in 2014, when a trip abroad found him stranded in a foreign city with an abundance of free time and a dearth of creative outlets. He began assembling the furniture in his room into a series of installations, photographing as he went along. Since then, his fascination with the hotel room as both a laboratory for creativity and a zone of transgression has only intensified. In the intervening years he has developed a stringent approach to making the work: he uses only the furniture found in the rooms he occupies; he works in secret; he works alone. Using this approach, Yudzon stacks, leans, and balances furniture in configurations that transform these generic interiors into hallucinatory worlds where the laws of physics are suspended and dormant emotions released. After the installations are documented, they are dismantled and the rooms returned to their original condition. The resulting photographs, shot in a style reminiscent of crime scene photography, remain the only existing evidence of what transpired during his stay.

Yudzon’s work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, including Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, China International Photography Biennial and the Arles Photo Festival. Yudzon was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in the fall of 2017. In 2018, he had a solo show with Slag Gallery in Brooklyn and a two-person show at Rick Wester Fine Art in New York. In 2019, Yudzon was awarded a NYFA grant for photography, and his work was included in Contemporary Performance, a museum wide exhibition at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts.

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Curatorial Partner: Byline is the culture magazine at the forefront of new media in New York, was conceived of as a place for contributors to be themselves. It was founded in 2023 by editors Gutes Guterman and Megan O’Sullivan, who have chosen the theme “art as play” for their curatorial throughline, presenting four artists for their insights into this paradox of pleasure and productivity.