Ana Cristea Gallery is delighted to present Like a Rolling Stone, a group exhibition featuring the work of Alexander Esters, Peter Gerakaris, and Justen Ladda. In 1965, Bob Dylan wrote the lyrics for this breakthrough song. The meaning of these lyrics was not entirely clear even to Dylan himself, yet people everywhere connected to the song in some ineffable way. In a similar vein, the three artists in this show seem to pull from familiar pop and cultural sources – yet those sources are somehow elusive. In the end, their work is fresh, accomplished, and engaging.

All three artists offer something new – Esters has never before been shown in the United States, Gerakaris is still in his 20s and just out of an MFA program, and Ladda (born in Germany but in the US for more than thirty years), though a celebrated mid-career artist, has not shown widely since the early 1990s.

Alexander Esters employs painting, sculpture, linocut, and stained glass to create “paintings” which draw upon twentieth-century greats like Picasso and Dali in addition to a host of pop references. Esters was included in a 2009-10 exhibition (with John Currin and Tomma Abts) entitled “Slow Paintings” at the Museum Morsbroich in Germany as well as at the Köln Skulpturenpark’s 2009-11 “Köln Skulptur 5: Reality Check.” In 2007, he was included in “XXL- Recent Large Scale Painting” at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY.

Peter Gerakaris, who received his MFA from Hunter College in 2009, lives and works in New York. His vibrant, colorful canvases reflect a fascination with the botanical and zoological and suggest the influence of Op, Pop, jazz, and Chinese and Japanese art. His work has been shown at the Bronx Museum of Art, Wave Hill (NYC), and The National Academy of Fine Arts.

Justen Ladda developed several distinct bodies of work over the last three decades that continue to evolve and grow. Their common themes are ‘illusion’, ‘transformation’ and ‘reflection’. He will be showing several new “mirrors” from a series he started in 2003, as well as sculptures of noses that evolved out of his fascination with the concept of ‘character’ and his ongoing interest in portraiture. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The New York Public Library and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others.