Artist Statement:

My obsession is the construction of us: how identity is shaped, performed, resisted, and transformed. I am interested in how we push against the limits placed upon us—through the body, through one another, and through the stories a culture tells about who we are.

For more than four decades, my work has moved across painting, photography, installation, and socially engaged practice. The work determines its medium.

The body is both witness and archive. It carries memory, desire, ambition, vulnerability, and history. How does physical presence operate within a culture increasingly shaped by image circulation, systems of visibility, class inequality, and market forces?

I create situations rather than predetermined outcomes. Whether making paintings, photographing women artists in spaces that reflect their lives and practices, staging unscripted actions in public space, or constructing environments others activate, I respond to what unfolds in real time. It is the unpredictability of that exchange that excites me: how bodies move, negotiate space, react, and assert agency in the moment.

Across all of this work, I seek to expand what the body can hold and communicate. Rather than replacing one fixed image with another, I am interested in building new ways of seeing that embrace contradiction, desire, vulnerability, power, and transformation.

Bio:

Grace Roselli is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, printmaking, installation, and socially engaged practice. For more than four decades, her work has explored how identity, power, and cultural memory are carried through the body and shaped through human interaction, creating works that move between portraiture, performance, documentation, and lived experience.

A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (1982), Roselli studied with Emilio Vedova at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and public venues in New York, Philadelphia, Europe, and beyond, with solo exhibitions including Beneath the Skin at Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia (1993), Shadow Maps at Pentimenti Gallery (1996), Falls the Shadow at Anita Friedman Fine Arts, New York (2007), The Uncanny Lady M at Mar Silver Design Lab, Westport, Connecticut (2014), and Naked Bike at MotorGrrl Garage, Brooklyn (2017). Recent and upcoming projects include exhibitions at the Carney Gallery at Regis College, Weston, Massachusetts (2025), and Bloodlines at Broodworks and NextWave Gallery, Brooklyn (2026).

Roselli is the creator of Pandora’s BoxX Project, an ongoing photographic portrait series she has built over seven years through direct encounters with women artists, curators, writers, and cultural practitioners across generations. The project has evolved into a significant intergenerational visual record examining visibility, authorship, and cultural memory within contemporary art.

Her work and ideas have been featured through lectures, panels, screenings, and public conversations at the Kreeger Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Artists Talk on Art, Zürcher Gallery, and the West Chelsea Festival of Art. Roselli is the recipient of awards from the New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Puffin Foundation. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ArtCritical, Brooklyn Rail, Nectar News, and Woman Rider.