Roni Stretch

Big Bear

2010

British artist Roni Stretch was born in England. He currently works between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His work has been shown extensively in California since the 1990’s, including shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Geffen Contemporary Museum, the Westmont Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Cooperstown Museum in New York. His works are held in numerous prestigious private, corporate and museum collections worldwide. He has recently been included in the permanent collections of the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Museum of California Design, the Cooperstown Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Stretch remains one of the most sophisticated painters of his generation. His oil paintings are meticulously created by executing a layering process whereby various colors are alternately applied and built up over many weeks. The subjects play against sharply lined borders intended to ground each painting in the physical and force a visual meditation. The images are not so much painted over as optically embedded within the multiple layers of the alternating colors. Stretch’s work is a lesson in contradictions: photorealism and abstraction, light and dark, reality and altered states, smooth and rough textures all ultimately leading to an emotional experience. Stretch had his first solo museum show January 2016 at the MOAH, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, California followed by a solo museum show in March 2017 at the W.Keith Janet Kellog University Art Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is currently working on an environmental animation project and his fine art carbon tech air purifying paint line designed for artists.