Lives and works in Los Angeles, California
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Being born and raised into the glossy, chill-centric culture of Los Angeles has not only infiltrated my identity politics and spurred my fixation with female beauty expectations, but it has also urged me to lean into my sense of humor as a mode of social survival. Comedy, strangeness, anxiety, and unnecessary overachievement define my work and my identity. If life is a sisyphean quest for cultivated L.A. chillness, then the inevitable and cyclical downhill tumble is lonely, dissociative, and self-flagellating.
Formally, my work harnesses these neurotic and comic tendencies. The use of colored pencils, a small unsophisticated material associated with childhood, not only points to the dissonance between highbrow and lowbrow in my thinking, but it also echoes the labor of the obsessive overachiever. That anal girl, in her relentless perfectionism, appears to be fun, or at least socially compliant, but within her obsessive attempts at greatness, there is an innate glitch: a sinister disobedience or a rippling strangeness that, in itself, is radically unsettling.
Prelapsarian Mirages, 2019, colored pencil on canvas, 24 x 24"
Get a Grip, 2018, colored pencil on canvas, 58 x 39"
Party of One, 2018, colored pencil on canvas, 62 x 50"
Still Life with Lemon, 2019, colored pencil on canvas, 48 x 68"
Blubbies, 2019, colored pencil on canvas, 14 x 14"
Paper Beats Rock, 2018, colored pencil on canvas, 48 x 36"
Beep the Ladybug Messing Everything Up, 2019, colored pencil on canvas, 62 x 60"
Peepee the Caterpillar Gets Her Learner's Permit, 2019, colored pencil on canvas, 14 x 14"
Peepee the Caterpillar Contemplates Mortality, 2019, colored pencil on canvas, 14 x 14"
Peepee the Caterpillar Dreams of Flying Free, 2019, colored pencil on canvas, 14 x 14"
About the Artist
Samantha Rosenwald (b. 1994, Los Angeles) received her BA in Art History from Vassar College in 2016 and her MFA in Fine Art from California College of the Arts in 2018. Rosenwald has shown with galleries such as Zevitas Marcus, Eve Leibe Gallery, CULT Exhibitions, and Mostyn Exhibitions, and has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, and Art of Choice Advisory. Rosenwald is based in LA and works primarily in painting, colored pencil, and ceramic. By threading together contemporary culture, visual pun, and the dogmas of art history, she creates absurd, personal, and darkly funny portraits which illustrate what it feels like to be alive.
samanthajrosenwald.com
