In Alfie Caine’s Paintings, Dreamy Interiors Meet Surreal Landscapes

Some boys collect Hot Wheels, some collect comic books. Alfie Caine collected miniature chairs. When the rising painter was growing up in London, he funneled a precocious love of furniture into acquiring dollhouse-sized models of iconic designs, like the Prouvé Standard Chair and the Eames LCW Lounge. He arranged them into imagined rooms on shelves in his bedroom—foreshadowing the pristine, just-so interiors that would later become the focus of his paintings. When, as an artistically gifted teenager, he began receiving commissions to draw people’s homes, he sometimes incorporated the tiny designs from his collection.

Now 28, Caine has turned his childhood obsession and adolescent side hustle into a full-blown career. Over the last five years, his dreamy domiciles have captured the attention of collectors on Instagram, where he made critical early sales, and of tastemaking galleries like Cob and MASSIMODECARLO. The appeal of his work is immediate: His canvases are large and enveloping, striped with crisp lines and washed in vivid colors. They depict spaces full of precious objects, with windows opening onto wide, fantastical vistas—like Architectural Digest spreads passed through a psychedelic filter. The scenery is inspired by the coastal marshland surrounding Caine’s home in East Sussex, England, but it resonates on both sides of the Atlantic. Following a memorable outing at New York’s Independent art fair last fall, Caine has returned to the city for his solo gallery debut in the U.S.: “The Chalk Carver’s House,” on view at Margot Samel through March 15th.

Two days before the opening, Caine was sipping chamomile tea (naturally, the Brit would have preferred black, but there was none to be found) in Samel’s compact Tribeca space, reflecting on the show’s origins. Two years ago, while driving with his mom along the southern coast of England, he spotted a beacon on the hillside: a glowing geoglyph, the giant form of a horse cut into the ground to expose the white limestone beneath its surface. Intrigued, Caine looked into the history of the carving, which was purportedly created by the sons of a local farmer in the 1830s. He then started to consider the life of one of the monument’s makers—the carver referenced in the exhibition’s title—in a trio of interconnected paintings that anchor the show. “I was imagining a space that a person who would create that kind of thing would live in,” he said pensively.

The space, as Caine envisioned it, includes a suite of three rooms rendered in radiant pinks, oranges, and golds. In Chalk Horse (all works 2025), a wide, uncluttered desk in the living room looks out over the hillside where the carver left his mark. That scene flows into Nine Legs, featuring a rose- and poppy-colored staircase and walls adorned with horse art. Next to that is the kitchen of Golden Hills, where a cut flower stem in a vase elegantly frames the view onto a dusky horizon. A river is prominent in the landscape; it cuts across all three works, acting as a horizontal axis that ties them together.

Despite Caine’s connection to the house’s imagined inhabitant, he left these rooms devoid of human figures—a consistent quality in his recent work. “I’m drawn to the unknowns,” he explained. “My favorite paintings tend to be ones where there’s that unknown, and it lends a sort of tension that makes you drawn to it and wanting to know more.”

Tension brews on the peripheries of these scenes. Action seems imminent, stirring a sense of anticipation. In Nine Legs, for example, we see the four legs of a dog, just barely in frame at the top of the stairs. Will he bound down to greet us? Another painting in the show, Shower Mist, depicts a bathroom with walls striped in macaron hues. The shower is running, with light from the window turning its spray into a mystical-looking fog. The door is ajar, suggesting that the bather has just stepped out and will return imminently. Are we intruding?

But those disruptions are purely hypothetical; the viewer remains, for now, alone. Attendant to their solitude is another kind of tension, between the allure of these spaces and the loneliness of experiencing them without company. It’s like Caine’s rooms are all dressed up with nowhere to go; they emanate both glamour and melancholy.

But for Caine, contentment coexists with isolation, which is a big part of his life in East Sussex. He first moved there in 2020 for an artist residency in the town of Rye. “I do love being there, because there’s no distraction, and I can kind of shut myself away,” he noted. The town’s population is under 5,000—a radical change of setting from his native London, or even from Cambridge, where he completed an architecture degree in 2018. When Caine’s initial residency in Rye ended, he returned to London but—despite being advised not to distance himself from the capital’s buzzy art scene—soon began hunting for a house and studio space in Rye. He was so captivated by the landscape that he knew he had to return, he said.

The feeling was familiar: Back in 2015, a formative trip to Iceland had inspired him to start painting in a different style and at a larger scale than he had previously. “All I wanted to do was paint it,” he said of the Icelandic terrain. “Then when I went to Rye, I got that same feeling. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I can live somewhere where I have that inspiration at my doorstep.’”