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, her work has been featured in group shows throughout New York City, including a two-person exhibition at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Manhattan in September 2022. Her work is currently included in Too Long at the Fair, a group exhibition at Golsa Gallery in Oslo, Norway, as well as A/Typical Now at Opening Gallery in New York City. Her show Suitcase Paintings at SPRING/BREAK Los Angeles is the first solo presentation of her work. Observer called her paintings "surreal minimalist jewels."
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, uncertainty; alongside hope, humor, and pleasure. Pulling from a lexicon of both created and borrowed symbols, Christakis juxtaposes different modes of representation within a single painting, from the hyper-real to the hyper-flat.