Lena Christakis (b. 1997) is a New York City based visual artist who grew up in Massachusetts and Vermont. She graduated from Yale University in 2020 with a BA in Art, concentrating in Painting. Since graduating, Christakis’s works, which Observer called “surreal minimalist jewels,” have been featured in group shows throughout New York City and internationally, including in Too Long at the Fair, an exhibition at Golsa Gallery in Oslo, Norway, The Last Slice at Badr El Jundi Gallery in Madrid, Spain, 500 Below at Smoke the Moon gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico as well as A/Typical Now at Opening Gallery in Manhattan. Earlier this year, her show Suitcase Paintings at SPRING/BREAK Los Angeles marked the first solo presentation of her work.
Christakis’s work elaborates on the highly coded still life genre, expanding the memento mori to more ambiguous ends. Sparsely arranged objects in un(der)defined environments speak simultaneously to multiple realities of the human condition. Loneliness, vanitas, boredom; alongside beauty, humor, and pleasure. Pulling from a lexicon of both created and borrowed symbols that collide, collapse, stack, and rest on her surfaces, Christakis juxtaposes different modes of representation within a single painting, from the hyper-real to the hyper-flat.