Grace Roselli

Grace Roselli

Grace Roselli was born in Brooklyn, NewYork and currently maintains a studio and home in Brooklyn, New York.

She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and received the RISD scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Upon graduation, she was awarded a residency with the Empire State Studio Program in NYC, then moved to Venice, Italy and studied with Emilio Vedova at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice.

Her work has been the subject of five solo exhibitions with the Anita Friedman Fine Arts gallery in NYC, and two solo exhibitions with the Pentimenti gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Group exhibitions included White Columns, Momenta Arts, The Alternative Museum, The National Arts Club, Supreme Trading Space, HP Garcia gallery, Pierre Menard gallery [Boston] etc. with the most recent being at ArtJail and The Hole in NYC's Lower East Side.

She co-curated [with Barbara Rusin] the well regarded group show "Voyeur's Delight" at Franklin Furnace in conjunction with a panel moderated by Martha Wilson, and guest edited the Magazine "New Observations".

Her work has been reviewed or mentioned in Fine Art Magazine, Metropolitan Home, Village Voice, Time Out New York, New York Times, Art Matters, Quarto 31 [Columbia University Press], Lusitania Press, and Whitehot Magazine among others.

Statement

Everyday life can be a trippy slog through the ugly, the beautiful and nefarious grey matter--particularly in an urban environment. I desire to escape the volatility and have some kind of peace with the absurd and amazing nature of existence. So I re-create the human drama and attempt to transform it.

I go into my studio, pick up a camera and stage a performance. The models receive no direction other than to be spontaneous and play with the light, their flesh and the props present on the set, i.e. armature wire, body paint and the like.

The resulting images become either digital prints or are further transformed thru the medium of oil paint. The scale of these paintings is the reach of my body--the paint, visceral and alive. Oftentimes I will use a background juxtaposition of myths and urban decay to engage with an open-ended narrative.