Andrei Roiter
May 2 - June 2, 2012
Opening Sunday, May 6, 2012
The Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present its third solo exhibition by Andrei Roiter, and the first at Jack Hanley Gallery’s Manhattan location. Roiter’s skillfully rendered paintings, photos and sculptures use a distinctive vocabulary of images and objects relating to the theme of travel, seen either as exploration or escape, both metaphysical and autobiographical.
Although his tragic-comic images and his Arte Povera manner might read as nostalgic, the true sentiment behind Roiter’s work is an admiration for images and ideas that last through time, long after the collapse of empire and the failure of utopian experiments. He identifies, rather, with the mentality of a tourist, collecting eccentric souvenirs or meaningful artifacts that hint at a selfhood made outside physical and political borders.
Andrei Roiter has continued to show extensively throughout Europe and the United States in the two decades since his previous exhibition at the San Francisco gallery in 1993 . His work is included in museum collections in Germany, Holland, Sweden, the United States, and Russia. Born in 1960 in Moscow, Roiter studied at the Moscow Institute of Architecture before leaving the country. He has traveled and worked in Brussels, Rome, Cologne and San Francisco, and is currently settled between New York and Amsterdam.