Get your “my kid could paint that” jokes ready, because Aelita Andre, the 7-year-old child prodigy painter, just opened a gallery exhibition in New York on October 28. Andre hails from Australia and began painting as an infant. She showed her first work in a gallery when she was just 20 months old.
The exhibition at Gallery 151 in Manhattan is her second in New York — the first was held at Agora Gallery and received a lot of press attention based on the novelty of her being only four years old at the time. Most artists would crawl over each other to get a review in the New York Times. Andre, though, had barely outgrown crawling when she received her first write-up in the Grey Lady. About the former exhibition, the Times gave a fairly positive notice, but did a good bit of hedging in a “for her age” kind of way.
The paintings show a lot of promise and surely both her parents being artists helps guide her talent. The work is somewhere between Rauschenberg combines and Miley Cyrus juvenalia. She does free-form abstraction and affixes bric-a-brac like dinosaurs and violins to the canvas. The violins are playable and cords hang from the canvas, ready to be plugged in for amplification.
Check out ANIMAL’s video above to see an interview with the precocious artist and find out her opinions on the giants of 20th-century art world. (Photo: Aymann Ismail/ ANIMAL New York)
