Lena Christakis b. 1997, USA

Pulling from the highly coded genres of still life and surrealism, Lena Christakis collapses classic conventions interlaced with her own personal (imagined and borrowed) symbology using a collage-like compositional strategy, letting the paintings slowly emerge over time diaristically. She’s drawn to the strange and beautiful earth magic of nature, the flattening of the digital age, windows, portals, the un-real, objects imbued with meaning, and the pleasures, humor, sadness, and uncertainty of being alive. Objects float without shadows on flat fields of color or stack on top of each other like they’re being dragged across the panel with a mouse. Often juxtaposing different modes of representation within a single painting, from the hyper-real to the ultra-flat, Christakis relishes in the actual practice and tactility of painting as she tries to decode the world around her.

Christakis graduated with a Bachelors in Art from Yale University with a concentration in painting and received the Yale Linck Fellowship in 2018. Since graduating, Christakis’s works, which Observer called “surreal minimalist jewels,” have been featured in group shows throughout New York City and internationally, including in Steve Turner, LA; Golsa Gallery in Oslo, Norway; Badr El Jundi Gallery in Madrid, Spain; and SPRING/BREAK Los Angeles which marked the first solo presentation of her work. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.