Michael Alvarez (b. 1983, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena in 2007. Alvarez draws from the wellspring of his own experience living and working in the city to produce intimate yet sociological paintings that capture the particularities of civic life within the vast metropolis. Steeped in nostalgia, his works offer a closely-observed, hyperreal reconstruction of LA: its people, its culture, its politics, and the public and domestic spaces that constitute its visual landscape.

Influenced by graffiti culture and its transformation of the urban sprawl, Alvarez uses a combination of oil and spray paint to build up
multilayered, diffuse surfaces which oscillate between the uncanny daze of a dream and the misty nostalgia of a memory. In preparation for his social scapes, Alvarez undertakes multiple site visits, traversing the terrain to experience it from every possible angle. Always towing a digital camera, he takes dozens of reference photographs of the scene to capture both key features and the most minute of details.