Adrian Piper - Alice Down the Rabbit Hole

Title: Alice Down the Rabbit Hole
Artist: Adrian Piper (1948-)
Date: 1965
Medium: Tempera on canvas board
Dimensions: 61 x 46 cm
Location: Private collection

Adrian Piper’s "Alice Down the Rabbit Hole" is a 1960s psychedelia painting, using Op Art (optical art) painting techniques to represent LSD-induced visions. The painting is inspired by Lewis Carroll's novel "Alice in Wonderland".

The painting belongs to Piper’s group of “LSD Paintings” while she was experimenting with LSD as a teenager and young adult.
Adrian Piper's works were some of the first in the 1960s which turned "Alice in Wonderland" into a psychedelic icon and the expression “chasing the white rabbit” becoming slang for taking LSD.

The surface of the painting is a swirl of dense, looping lines, distorted checkerboard patterns, bands of colors, acidic oranges, reds and blues. The forms twist like currents or vortexes, suggesting a tunnel, a black hole and timelapse. There is no normal perspective and everything is pulsating, on fire, fluid, twirling...

Within this turbulence you can make out a falling figure, Alice, with her dress and legs flung out.

The painting depicts altered consciousness, how it feels like to fall into a changed state of mind, to be disorientated, to be on unstable grounds, to have lost control, to have surreal sensations...

Adrian Piper's art later evolved towards more political works such as "Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features" (1981), or "Self-Portrait as Nice White Lady" (1995) and also conceptual and performance works.