Andrei Roiter

Andrei Roiter - Backstage

Biography of the Artist: Born in the bosom of the Soviet Union, from a very young age Andrei Roiter manifested his vocation for painting although he enrolled in Architecture and painted in hiding. Together with other artists such as Nikolai Filatov and Herman Vinogradov, they created the Kindergarden group, which was for a time the center of the Moscow artists' world, using the abandoned building they guarded as an art center. Until the age of 28 Roiter lived in Moscow, working discreetly in painting, until Gorbachev's open-minded government made it possible for the artist to leave Russia for the first time in 1988, to attend an exhibition in Brussels. He subsequently settled in Amsterdam, where he still maintains his studio today, along with New York. Whenever Roiter visits his native Russia, he feels a stranger in Moscow, as he does in Amsterdam or New York. His destiny is to be a permanent foreigner and it is this idea that permeates all his work. Andrei Roiter's work is a compendium of a whole series of personal experiences that go back to his youth - marked by Soviet totalitarianism - and extend to the current global political climate. Issues such as emigration, voluntary exile and the search for one's own identity are present in the artist's iconographic repertoire. Thus, one of the elements that Roiter repeats the most is the square with the circle in the center, where the artist speaks to us of openness and flight. Roiter is also inspired by other artists who interact with spatial limits, such as Lucio Fontana or Gordon Matta-Clark. Architecture is another of his most reiterated themes, as it should be remembered that he trained for some years in this discipline. He uses dark and muted colors, under which underlies the melancholy of the artist and where, however, the presence of a delicate luminosity persists.