Exhibitions Featuring Elektra KB

Roman Fine Art is pleased to present Get with the Program 2017, the second edition of our annual holiday group exhibition.  This exhibit will feature painting, photography and mixed media works by nine contemporary artists working in a variety of media and genres.  The exhibit opens with a public reception for the artists Saturday, November 11, 6 – 8pm.

This diverse exhibition includes many subgenres within Contemporary art including street art, figural, conceptual, geometric abstraction, sociopolitical and landscape.  The eclectic nature of this group show is intended to reflect the diverse program regularly offered at Roman Fine Art.  In addition to offering works by Maya Hayuk, Elektra KB, Reisha Perlmutter, Leah Schrager, Sarah Slappey and SWOON, this year’s edition of Get with the Program introduces our clientele to three fresh, new faces; Christina Creutz, Lizzie Gill and Ciara Rafferty.

As always, Roman Fine Art is committed to bringing exciting, provocative and relevant new artistic voices to our clientele.  Our mission is to create an environment in the Hamptons dedicated to supporting the very best in New Contemporary Art.  Among the talented and internationally renowned artists to have exhibited in Roman Fine Art’s exhibitions are Ivan Alifan, Ray Caesar, Colin Christian, Michael Dweck, Ron English, EVOL, Shepard Fairey, Mark Jenkins, Steven Klein, Anthony Lister, RETNA, Swoon and Nicola Verlato.

Artists exhibited at Roman Fine Art range from future stars to established forces within the global art community.  Many have had their work exhibited in important museums and galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Deitch Projects and the Corcoran Gallery of Art just to name a few.  Profiles of these artists and their work have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Artnews, Juxtapoz, the New York Daily News, The Observer, High Fructose and many more relevant publications.

 

ARTISTS INCLUDED IN GET WITH THE PROGRAM 2017:

 

Christina Creutz, Lizzie Gill, Maya Hayuk, Elektra KB, Reisha Perlmutter, Ciara Rafferty, Leah Schrager, Sarah Slappey and SWOON         

2012

Roman Fine Art is pleased to announce the return of Art on the Edge. Art on the Edge is an annual survey of New Contemporary Art featuring the most provocative new painters, sculptors and photographers working in their respective mediums today. Art on the Edge 2017 opens with a cocktail reception for the artists at Roman Fine Art Saturday, July 1st, 7-9pm. The exhibit continues through Sunday, July 23rd.

 

Celebrating its seventh year, Art on the Edge embodies Roman Fine Art’s mission to provide an environment in the Hamptons dedicated to recognizing and supporting New Contemporary Art by showcasing the cutting-edge talent increasingly pervading mainstream culture. As always, Art on the Edge strives to further advance the dialogue of New Contemporary art movements from around the country with a national roster of relevant new artists. Each year, the eclectic nature and quality of work featured in this special exhibition have made it the “must-see” summer event for savvy Hamptons contemporary art collectors.

 

As with last year’s edition, Art on the Edge expands beyond the gallery walls and into Market Art & Design, celebrating its 7th year as well. This continued partnership with the premier Hamptons art fair allows Roman Fine Art to expand the scope and depth of the Art on the Edge brand. Market Art & Design opens Thursday, July 6th at 6pm at the Bridgehampton Historical Society in Bridgehampton, NY and continues through Sunday, July 13th.

 

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: 

 

Ivan Alifan is a Russian-Canadian artist working in New York City. Alifan presents large scale oil paintings which aim to naturalize the modern gaze and decriminalizes sex in art, his ambiguous figurative paintings are revealed and transformed within the act of the individual view.

 

Ray Caesar is an English artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. Describing his work as “digital surreal”, Caesar merges elements of the decorative and architectural, Art Deco and Victorian visual codes. His portraits of childlike creatures portray elements of the grotesque, however are offset by their fairytale surroundings. His painterly haunting imagery is digitally created using 3D modelling software.

 

Tim Conlon an American artist lives and works between Los Angeles and Washington. Conlon is best known for large-scale murals, graffiti, particularly freight train graffiti. Conlon takes inspiration from the logos, typography, and color schemes of old freight trains.

 

Colin Christian is an English artist based in Florida. Christian takes inspiration from materials used for special effects makeup, creating larger-than-life fiberglass figures which are then coated with silicone to produce a “cartoon realism” finish. Christian finds inspiration in old sci-fi movies, anime, and ambient electronic music.

 

Michael Dweck is a photographer from Long Island, New York. Known for his photographs of the body situated in the local environments of the Hamptons area, his is an American version of the Arcadian vision. Blending nostalgia, fantasy, and documentation the photographs present a compelling portrait of a place in time and a way of life at once fading and being reinvented with each new season.

 

Maya Hayuk is a painter and muralist based in Brooklyn New York. Her symmetrical compositions, intricate patterns, and lush colors recall views and documentation of outer space, traditional Ukrainian crafts, airbrushed manicures, and mandalas. Engaging a mix of referents from popular culture and advanced painting practices she is constantly in pursuit of psychedelic experience in visual form.

 

Jessica Lichtenstein is a New York based artist using the female body as a mechanism to explore deeper themes of power, female representation, fetishism and objectification. Fascinated by the mass-production and fetishization of hyper-sexualized Japanese figurines, Lichtenstein’s first series manipulated the presentation and context of mass-produced anime dolls in order to imbue them with new associations and richer meaning.

 

Justin Mays an American designer and animator based in Los Angeles, who mixes digital collages and glitch art to create visually explosive and colorful compositions. His work is often described as with psychedelic pop.

 

Reisha Perlmutter is a Brooklyn-based painter interested in how water and light blur the separation between body and nature in her imagery. Drawn to the organic nature of oil paint, Perlmutter explores the way it bleeds, glows, moves, and transforms over time.

 

POSE is a Brooklyn-based artist using graffiti and oil on canvas, blending illustration, lettering and comic book aesthetics to explore the range of human emotion, presented in color compositions.

 

Leah Schrager is an artist based in New York, interested in digital personas, representations of the female body and the male gaze. Known for her exploration of “selfie” culture Schrager, explores ownership, and body positivity.

 

Sarah Slappey is a painter based in New York. Slappey explores Southern Gothic aesthetic, an amalgamation of Bible Belt superstition, ghost stories, swamp lore and mysticism. Her paintings explore pleasure and pain as experienced through evolving narratives, haunted places, seductive color, and dark humor.

 

SWOON is a mixed-media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally known for her graffiti and activist work, she specializes in life-size wheat-paste prints and paper cutouts of human figures.

 

Dean West is an Australian Photographer who lives in New York. His complex imagery blends several ideas seamlessly into one image, often leaving the viewer with an unsettling feeling. He is best known for his intricate and highly staged photographs that take everyday occurrences beyond the realm of natural reality.

 

Zevs is a French street artist, best known for his trademark “liquidation” technique, where the artist takes popular logos and iconography and “dissolves” them, commenting on their omnipresence and yet instability of their existence in today’s world

Roman Fine Art is pleased to announce our participation in the 17th edition of SCOPE New York as it returns to a new Chelsea location at Metropolitan Pavilion. Featuring a critically-acclaimed exhibition design, SCOPE New York’s convenient and well-appointed venue will host 60 international galleries and a focused schedule of special events, performances and talks to complement its daily VIP program.

The first fair to run concurrent with The Armory Show, SCOPE New York’s spirit of innovation has consistently forged the way for emerging artists and galleries. Attuned to nuances in the market and itself an influential force in the cultural sphere, SCOPE continues to usher in a new vision of the contemporary art fair.

Long-established as the original incubator for emerging work, SCOPE’s Breeder Program celebrates its 16th year of introducing new galleries to the contemporary market. A remarkable opportunity for exposure, Breeder Program alumni include: Peres Projects, John Connelly Presents, Galeria Enrique Guerrero, Daniel Reich Gallery, Bischoff/ Weiss, Spinello Projects, INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, SEVENTEEN, ROKEBY, Taxter Spengemann, and Magical Artroom, among other notable galleries.

Roman Fine Art is pleased to present “Deconstructing Borders: The Flux of Dissent,” its first solo exhibition with Elektra KB, opening Friday, January 27th, 6-8 pm, and running through February 19th.

Elektra KB, born in Odessa, Ukraine, is a Colombian artist living and working in Berlin and New York. KB’s body of work is of a performative nature in the thread of the post-colonial discourse and uses the platform of the personal mythology: The Theocratic Republic of Gaia, a Utopian-Dystopian world.

“Deconstructing Borders: The Flux of Dissent” speaks to issues about migration, mobility, transculturality, and a sense of place. The discourse is informed by the current experience of migrant women. This year is seeing a refugee and migrant crisis all over the world. Our current President Elect– aided by the media– is a symbolic figure who plays a key role in constructing the fear of immigration which is fed to the American public. Plans of building a wall to separate the USA and Mexico are being considered. Over 35,000 refugees and migrants died in their attempt to reach or stay in Europe since 2000, with 2016 being the deadliest by far. Money is being lavishly spent on detention centers, on walls being erected and even artificial sniffers that can smell refugees and migrants trying to hide at border crossing points are being developed in Europe. The post-modern hybridization of culture is fueled with violence and power games.

Many of the works included in “Deconstructing Borders” have culminated from a year-long fellowship in Berlin. During this time, KB traveled to what she perceived as a mutant city, where east meets west driven by the interest of unpacking her own conflicted feelings of sense-of-place and home of an Odessa born Latin-American living in New York and her interest in the issue of migration. She researched the experiences of migrant women from post-colonial societies focusing specifically on Latin-America, in the context of a city that is a post-soviet hybrid. KB undertook the task of interviewing several women who left their countries for a variety of reasons, existential, economic, psychological and political persecution. KB created works as a result of this research. Each work is inspired and/or performed based on an individual story, or a collective story. KB uses textile, photography and video as her main mediums.

“Deconstructing Borders: The Flux of Dissent” features six new GIFs highlighting Elektra KB’s fantastical world, The Theocratic Republic of Gaia, or T.R.O.G. for short. The T.R.O.G., plays with critical humor and the aesthetics of colonial art tropes and the insurgent struggle KB grew up with. The Papess, the veiled women, the guerrilla fighter are represented here as well as pre-Hispanic imagery and the cross– an autobiographical nod to her upbringing in a rural hospital in Colombia. The T.R.O.G. serves as an allegorical homeland created from a sense of necessity—the artist has spent most of her life as a migrant. Anxieties over oppression—from religious authority to gender/racial inequality—are battled out in KB’s fictional country. KB has perhaps best summarized the urgency of her militant aesthetic by quoting Frantz Fanon from his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth: “Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying.”

Elektra KB received a DAAD award to pursue a visual arts fellowship with professor Hito Steyerl at Berlin Univeristy of the Arts.  In 2016 She received her MFA from Hunter college.  Her work has been written about in ARTnews and she was named an artist to watch by British art critic Zoe Pilger, in the Independent Newspaper in 2015.  Her animated GIFs have been featured in Art F City’s acclaimed, Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies: The Animated GIF as Place curated by Paddy Johnson and Rea McNarama and at Moving Image Istanbul.  KB has shown at Gaia Gallery in Istanbul, Bravin Lee Programs in NY and the Istanbul Contemporary Art fair.  Her work will be included in El Museo Biennial in New York in 2017. Eight works by KB were just acquired by the Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art in China.

Roman Fine Art is pleased to present Get With The Program I, the first of its two part inaugural exhibition opening Saturday, Oct 8th.  This group exhibition will feature painting, photography and sculpture by a dozen contemporary artists working in a variety of media and genres.  The exhibit opens with a public reception for the artists Saturday, October 8, 6 – 8pm.

This diverse exhibition includes many subgenres within New Contemporary art including Street Art, Pop Surrealism, Conceptual, Abstract, Sociopolitical and Graffiti.  The eclectic nature of this group show is intended to reflect the curatorial taste of the gallery’s Director, Damien A. Roman.  “Get With the Program introduces our clientele to our new location, in the heart of East Hampton, as well as to some of the wonderful artists that we represent.”   A few special guest artists with be featured as well.

ARTISTS INCLUDED IN GET WITH THE PROGRAM:

Scott Bluedorn, Troy Brooks, Ray Caesar, Darlene Charneco, Eddie Colla, Tim Conlon, Gentleman’s Game, Grant Haffner, JURNE, Elektra KB, Dan Sabau, Sarah Slappey, SWOON, Mary Theinert & Dean West