Nine Months Old, Canvas in Hand
In Melbourne, Australia, in late 2007, a baby girl who was still learning to hold objects began reaching for her parents' art materials. Her father, a professional photographer named Michael Andreichikov, and her mother Nikka Andre, a dancer of Russian descent, had spread canvas and brushes on the floor — a common enough arrangement in a creative household. What happened next was not common at all. Nine-month-old Aelita began to paint.
Not scribble. Not smear, in the random way infants sometimes do with whatever they find. Aelita engaged with the materials deliberately — choosing colors, layering paint, adding objects she pulled from around her, bark and feathers and twigs pressed into wet acrylic with an intention that, at first, her parents could hardly believe was real. They began filming her, partly in wonder, partly because they could feel that what they were watching was not ordinary.
By the time she was two years old, her parents submitted her work anonymously to a group exhibition in Melbourne. The curators, seeing canvases dense with color and textural depth, accepted the work without hesitation. When they discovered the artist was a toddler, the art world's first encounter with Aelita Andre produced the reaction that has never quite stopped: disbelief, then a longer, quieter attention.
"When I first saw her work, I thought I was looking at a mature abstract expressionist. Then they told me she was two. I had to sit down." — Art critic reviewing her early Melbourne exhibition
At age four, Aelita's solo exhibition at the Agora Gallery in New York sold out in seven days. The paintings — wild, joyful, bristling with embedded objects and swirling acrylics — commanded prices that professional artists spend careers trying to achieve. International art press descended. The New York Times, The Guardian, and art publications across Europe ran features. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, called her the youngest person ever to appear in Wikipedia based entirely on her own accomplishments.
Her style — which she would come to call Magical Abstraction — drew comparisons to the Surrealist automatism of Miro and the chromatic richness of Kandinsky, yet possessed a quality unique to Aelita: a sense of genuine play that somehow produced work of formal depth. Where adult abstract painters strive to recapture a childlike spontaneity, Aelita had the actual thing, combined with an eye that instinctively understood composition and tension.
In 2016, when she was nine, Aelita became the youngest artist in history to stage a solo exhibition at a major Russian museum — the Merry Hall Museum in St. Petersburg, the cultural capital of her Russian heritage. The show received critical praise that made no concessions to her age. Reviewers discussed the work on its own terms, which is perhaps the highest compliment.
"I paint what I feel. I don't plan it. I let the colors take me somewhere." — Aelita Andre
Aelita's performances — painting live in front of audiences of tens of thousands, including a landmark show in Utah attended by 20,000 people — added a theatrical dimension to her practice. She moves through large canvases with the physical presence of a dancer, her mother's influence perhaps visible in the way she inhabits space. The paintings that result from these live performances are among her most viscerally powerful.
Now in her late teens, Aelita Andre has produced hundreds of paintings, exhibited on multiple continents, and earned a permanent place in any honest account of the art world's most remarkable prodigies. Her works sell for $50,000 and above. She is also a musician and composer, extending her creative practice beyond the canvas. What began before she could walk continues to astonish.