Biography

Since first exhibiting his work in the early 1980’s, Bay area native Rob Setrakian has developed a liberating and intuitive painting style that is abstract, primal and unencumbered by reliance on figurative limitations. To look at his painted surfaces is to witness a conversation between the artist and the world around him and more definitively, between the painter and his medium. Setrakian’s method begins with one fearless gesture onto a surface and evolves with each stroke into meditations on texture and color, energy and light, continuity and fissure. His finished paintings are imbued with a suggestive sense of motion and energy that border on the performative and seem to preserve the artist’s actions in a language of their own. While vestiges of figures, objects and landscapes begin to emerge from the compositions, they consistently give way to more primary but subtle themes and universal relationships that occur in the natural world. The interplay between hot and cold, bright and dark, dry and damp, interior and exterior will ultimately preside where more concrete and reductive forms simply melt away.
 

Rob Setrakian has exhibited work since the early 80s locally, nationally, and internationally including the Bolinas Museum, Fresno Art Museum, Charles Cowles Annex Gallery in New York, the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah and Galleria Teorema in Florence, Italy. He received his BA from Stanford University in 1979 and was strongly influenced by his mentor Nathan Oliveira, as well as artists Frank Lobdell and Keith Boyle. Setrakian’s work is represented in many public collections including the De Young Museum, Portland Art Museum, and Stanford University Hospital.