Graham’s Fine Art Gallery is proud to welcome contemporary artist, Christy Lee Rogers, this spring for her South African solo debut and new collection, Hybrids.

Often referred to as the contemporary counterpart of Baroque master painters like Caravaggio and Rubens, Christy Lee Rogers is known for capturing the hope and vulnerability of the human condition in her works. Her capacity to excite the senses while provoking the audience with vivacious movement and purpose, stirs our memory of the straining and cascading bodies, seasoned with emotion, of the Renaissance and Baroque art movements.

In her newest collection Hybrids, Rogers assembles hybrid human and flower beings, photographed underwater in her distinctive technique and style that have earned her international recognition. She then created watercolor and acrylic paintings that were meticulously layered into several of the final images. Inspired by Impressionist painters like Van Gogh and Monet, Baroque artist Jan Davidsz de Heem and contemporary pop artist Takashi Murakami, Rogers uses the flower as a powerful symbol to channel the depth of her heart and soul and respond to a world ripe with corruption and war, in the way she knows best.

From life to death, from passion to enlightenment, flowers have had many meanings throughout time. From youth, humility, faith, hope, the divine, beauty, to chastity, fertility, fragility, mourning, hope and rebirth; these blossoming fragile creatures have historically been one of the most alluring life forms on the planet, and yet one of the most transitory. Representing the ultimate beauty and the natural flow of Mother Nature, the flower has been an influential part of modern, Greek, Asian, Aztec, Egyptian, Chinese – and other – cultures and mythology.

This exhibition not only demonstrates her prolific use of the photographic medium to transform reality, but also her ethereal approach to life itself. One of Rogers’ favorite quotes, as expressed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince is, “If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that’s enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars”.