Andrei Roiter

Andrei Roiter - Backstage 2

Biografía del Artista: Born in the heart of the Soviet Union, Andrei Roiter showed his vocation for painting from a very young age, although he enrolled in Architecture and painted clandestinely. Together with other artists such as Nikolai Filatov and Herman Vinogradov, they created the Kindergarden group, which was for a time the centre of the world of Moscow artists, using the abandoned building they guarded as an art centre. Until the age of 28, Roiter lived in Moscow, working quietly on his painting, until Gorbachev's liberal 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, along with New York. Whenever Roiter visits his native Russia, he feels like a stranger in Moscow, just 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 most is the square with the circle in the centre, where the artist speaks to us of openness and escape. 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 repeated themes, as it must be remembered that he trained for some years in this discipline. He uses dark and dull colours, under which the artist's melancholy underlies and where, however, the presence of a delicate luminosity persists.