Girl student 2012

Alexander Roitburd made this painting, Girl student, with oil on canvas. Look at that skin! He's really feeling the fleshiness of the figure; the color shifts like a sunset, all peach and rose, pulled towards earth by the brown background. It's a juicy, alive surface made with loose brushwork, the painting itself seems to breathe. The palette is fairly restricted, but within that, there’s a real joy in the handling of the paint. See those strands of gold that frame the figure? They pull your eye around the composition and lead back to the face, upturned as if in prayer. The painting is sensual but also devotional, a bit like a Caravaggio. That tension is characteristic of Roitburd’s practice. His work is always caught between worlds, never settling into a single, fixed meaning. He's showing us that being a painter means embracing ambiguity.