The Square, Unfinished: Alexander James at Philips Gallery, Hong Kong

Looking at Alexander James’s latest work, one provocation lingers: his audacious return to the “square” in 2026, a wager on whether the form might yet disclose something unforeseen.

Alexander James by Robin Blake.

While the shape has been exhausted, systematised, spiritualised, and flattened by everyone from Kazimir Malevich to Josef Albers, James refuses to treat the format as a resolved case. In his latest work “Dissecting the Square”, he approaches geometry not as an artifact of the past, but as a living, continuous work. 

Opening at Phillips Gallery, the exhibition eschews easy simplicity. The tone is set by a shaft of light cutting across an empty canvas, a signal that the square here is a condition, a boundary designed specifically to be interrupted.

‘In A Place of Portrait’, 2026. Alexander James.

James responds to this geometry by breaking it down, literally. Each canvas is divided into four equal quadrants, self-contained but never fully independent, moving with a tension that resists easy resolution. What initially presents as rigid order eventually reveals itself to be unstable, as if the structure is constantly negotiating whether to remain whole or fracture entirely. 

The work sits in deliberate, sophisticated dialogue with the art historical canon; Albers’ “Homage to the Square” serves as a vital counterpoint where James complicates the optical clarity with memory, distortion, and psychological residue. 

Alexander James by Kateryna Mitskevych.

Nearby, a sculpture by Sean Scully pushes this logic into three dimensions, questioning what happens when geometry sheds its flatness and begins to carry physical and emotional weight.

One feels other spectral presences in the room, the emotional saturation of Mark Rothko, the industrial restraint of Donald Judd, and the structural defiance of Frank Stella, yet James absorbs these influences, allowing them to dissolve into a more a singular, intimate, personal vernacular. 

Beneath the grid, a hidden narrative pulses where faces surface and vanish, and figures struggle toward the light. What begins as notation, sketches, fragments, and scrawled thoughts, evolves into something physical and iterative. James describes the process as “a marathon of lots of little sprints,” and that kinetic energy is palpable; nothing feels static, even when the architecture of the frame suggests it should be. 

‘Slowly Dissolving’, 2025. Alexander James.

Ultimately, the exhibition asks the viewer to wait and see what the form might yet become. If Modernism treated the square as an endpoint, James repositions it as a site of perpetual return, unresolved in a way that feels entirely necessary again.