“I thought this is probably all in my imagination,” she said. I wanted Aelita’s work judged on its own merits.” Kalashnikova admits she felt “strange and silly” with a baby’s portfolio. After all, you never walk into a gallery and say, this artist is 24 or this one is 84. “I simply told the curator she’s a female artist. “I just looked at and thought it was something really amazing,” Kalashnikova recalled. When Aelita was 19 or 20 months, her Russian-born mother Nikka Kalashnikova decided to show some of her daughter’s work “on a whim” to Mark Jamieson, the director of a commercial gallery in Melbourne that represented her own photography. According to her Australian father Michael Andre, at around nine months, she crawled onto a canvas of his and started “smearing paints around.” Within a year, Aelita had amassed a collection of over 60 paintings in the family’s home. What do you want to be when you grow up? A paleontologist and a painter.Īs the story goes, Aeilta started painting before she could walk. Who are your favorite artists? Well, you and daddy, pointing to her parents, a photographer and a filmmaker.

Do you like princesses? Not all, only the really strong ones. My son has also given me a list of questions for Aelita, which I sprinkle during my adult ones. On the advice of my five-year old son, since it’s Halloween week, I’ve brought the artist a red, candy Ring Pop she plays with or sucks on for most of our time together. Her canvases, some of which incorporate glitter and tiny, plastic dinosaurs-the kind you might find in a child’s party favor-are already labeled with whimsical, precocious titles like “The Dome of the Dinosaur Spa” and “Rainbow Splash And The Fish Feather.” Her mother is adamant that Aelita names each painting unassisted. Aelita’s parents tell me she’s still jetlagged and wakes them at 3:30 a.m., ready to the start the day. This time, her current gallery is calling it a 'pop-up' exhibition, since it runs only for a week, with the pieces then stored on Mott street for potential buyers to view. It is the day before the opening of “Oracle of Space,' her third, solo New York show (her last was in June 2012). She runs from a back room, energetic and shy. When I arrive at the 18th Street gallery two blocks west of Chelsea’s blue-chip art district, Aelita seems like a typical little girl in bright pink sneakers. Are her pieces only here, in one of the most influential art markets- and reportedly selling for five-figure sums-because she’s so young? Must a prodigy eventually break new ground? Be able to reflect on her work? Are prodigies culturally determined or are there scientific criteria? Once again, the media seems taken with the idea that a child’s art may be a joke on a self-important art world.īut Aelita’s journey to the center of the New York art scene raises deeper questions about what actually makes a prodigy and to what extent the artist even matters.

And as contemporary art becomes more conceptual, it’s harder to know what makes a piece of art great: the object itself, the story behind it, or both? Seven-year-old Australian abstract painter Aelita Andre, whose latest exhibition opened in Manhattan last week, embodies what one art historian calls the “my kid could do that” impulse. For many, the dripping splatters or scribbles seem haphazard and simplistic, not unlike something an average toddler might do with a set of finger paints. Stand before any abstract painting-try a Jackson Pollock or a Cy Twombly- and it’s inevitable someone will say: My child could have done that.

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