Christian Rosa

Christian Rosa born in 1982, Rio de Janeiro is an artist who works across media but whose main focus is on collage and painting. He studied under Daniel Richter at Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna where he graduated in 2012. Rosa is part of a young generation of artists whose work continues to stretch the boundaries of abstract art. Rosa actively engages in a reductivist approach to painting by limiting his gestures to individual physical actions that intertwine with each other across the canvas. The artist perceives his work as a discovery process in which he learns by deconstructing the surface of the painting. His works deal with mistakes that are displaced, re-appropriated and reconfigured in order to explore the archeology of painting and the notion of failure as a guiding conceptual model.
While viewers may see a similarity to artists like Cy Twombly, or Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rosa’s aesthetic is entirely his own. Beyond his work as a painter, Christian Rosa also organises exhibitions, film screenings and publications, especially in Vienna where he lives for part of the year.