Shanee Roe USA, b. 1996

Shanee Roe was born in 1996 in New York and lives and works in Berlin. Her formation as an artist was shaped by movement across several cities and institutions: she studied fine arts and animation at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) in Leipzig under Professor Christoph Ruckhäberle, and at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien under Professor Daniel Richter, two of the most significant figurative painters working in the German-speaking world. This dual training, combining Leipzig's tradition of painterly figuration with Vienna's more conceptually inflected approach, is legible in the ambition and range of her practice.

Roe works primarily in painting, drawing, collage, and animation. Her canvases are populated by figures that resist easy categorisation: bodies that are simultaneously vulnerable and aggressive, tender and grotesque, sexual and absurd. She approaches interpersonal situations, intimacy, desire, and power dynamics not through psychological distance but through an immediacy of mark-making that feels both impulsive and precisely controlled. Her palette is saturated and emotionally loaded, with reds that carry both passion and violence, greens that suggest growth and passivity in equal measure, yellows that tip between exuberance and unease. The figures in her paintings, often depicted in states of physical entanglement or emotional exposure, carry large, expressive heads with wide eyes designed to provoke both empathy and discomfort. References to art history, from the Maria lactans of the old masters to the anti-intellectual energy of the Neue Wilde, surface in her work as points of departure rather than citation. Roe's multicultural background and her experience of arriving repeatedly in new cities as a stranger have shaped a practice defined by heightened vulnerability and acute observational sensitivity.

Roe's institutional exhibition history has grown steadily since her first verified solo presentation in 2020. Subsequent solo exhibitions include a solo exhibition in Turin, Clinging Knots at 68projects by KORNFELD, Berlin (April to June 2025), and Playdate at Museum Bensheim (21 February to 29 March 2026), described by the museum as her first museum solo exhibition. Group exhibitions have included Gegen den Strich at the SPSG Museum, Potsdam; the Historic Hampton House Museum of Art and Culture, Miami; and Berlin Realists at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2025). Her work has been presented at international art fairs including Untitled Art Fair in Miami and Art Düsseldorf (2025). In 2026, Shanee Roe received the art karlsruhe Prize for her one-artist presentation through KORNFELD Galerie Berlin, one of the fair's most prominent distinctions, awarded for the most compelling solo booth presentation.

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has accompanied Shanee Roe’s international development. The gallery presented her work at Art Düsseldorf (2025) and at art karlsruhe (2026), where she received the fair’s prize. The gallery’s project space 68projects by KORNFELD hosted her solo exhibition Clinging Knots from 30 April to 7 June 2025, a body of work exploring intimacy, desire, and the tension between connection and disconnection through painting and collage. Roe has also participated in group exhibitions and viewing room presentations organised through the gallery’s programme.

At an early stage in what is already a compelling career, Shanee Roe has established herself as one of the most distinctive figurative painters of her generation, with a practice that continues to deepen in its psychological range and painterly ambition.