Samantha Rosenwald — Born 1994, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles. 

 

Samantha Rosenwald creates identity-based paintings that are inspired by her upbringing in glitzy, body-conscious Los Angeles. She describes her youthful self as a frizzy-haired, comically chubby chicken nugget who was fixated with female beauty expectations, and who developed a keen sense of humor as a mode of social survival. Comedy, strangeness, anxiety, and unnecessary overachievement define her work and identity. In formal terms, her work also harnesses these neurotic and comic tendencies.  

 

"If life is a Sisyphean quest for cultivated LA chillness, then the inevitable and cyclical downhill tumble is lonely, dissociative, and self-flagellating."

​

Rosenwald uses colored pencils, a small unsophisticated material associated with childhood, to obsessively complete her highly detailed works. That anal (obsessive) 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.

 

Rosenwald 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. She has recently shown with Arsenal Contemporary, Annarumma Gallery, Eve Leibe Gallery, and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery - and has been featured in magazines such as Voyage LA, New American Paintings, and Art Maze Mag.