Rosanna Dean is a multidisciplinary artist in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art, Camberwell College of Art and studied Old Master painting at the Angel Academy Florence. Dean returned from Kerala, India, follow research in Theyyam ritual and Indian temples. Her practice addresses conflicting ideologies surrounding representations of the divine. Seeking to establish connections between the ways in which societies have depicted religious belief over time, she combines the features of divergent practices from East to West to create work with a contemporary spiritualism.
She is currently the artist in residence at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies exploring embodied practice, visual material and Sanskrit.
Dean is fascinated with the grotesque, and beauty and repulsion intermingle in her canvases. The figures become decontextualized, ambiguous, anonymous forms that hover in space. The body stripped of its individual identity becomes a vehicle for exploring shared fears and experiences. The common site where different perspectives, viewpoints and histories collide. Dean creates an open discourse in deciphering the objects on her canvas and installations, to probe our contemporary beliefs, and question what the body means to her viewer.
Having taken religious painting of the past as her starting point, Dean has spent time deeply researching how its transformative effects are achieved. Her research has led her to employ centuries old techniques of layers and glazing to achieve the desired luminosity and lifelikeness with her oils. Her most recent works re tell stories through installations and performance that ask her viewer to consider their relationship to materials and dependency on rapidly disappearing eco-systems.
She worked with Gregory Ryan alongside environmental organisations (2009-12) and with artist and activist Rashad Salim developing the Iraqi Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021).
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