Roman Gulman is a Ukrainian-born artist, who attempts to study the human nature through his fragmentary, bold-colored paintings. He studied art in Kiev, and after moving to Israel he worked in the fashion and design industry as a graphic designer, an art director, and a branding specialist. In the last few years, he returned to his first love – painting. His work is influenced by 19th century Russian art and French Impressionism – the latter left a significant impact on him since childhood. In his paintings these influences manifest through the color palette and the expressive style, which are also reminiscent of contemporary urban art.

Gulman’s format of choice is large portraiture, which aims to reveal rare and authentic moments of his subjects during their day-to-day life. The people he painted live in different locations around the world, and each of them have distinctive characteristics, yet in his paintings they appear as a community which seems to exist beyond any specific time and place. Gulman likes removing his glasses during his creation process, allowing himself to see the blurriness of the color rather than the sharpness and details. His colorful paintings have a unique fragmentary quality which emphasizes the universal aspect of his work.Young continued to photograph celebrities and direct music videos, eventually leading him to the United States. The rock star aesthetic he had brandished in his photography lent itself to his earliest screen prints that followed in the 2000s. His first series, Pig Portraits, shown in Los Angeles in 2003, collected the infamous mugshots (real and staged) of celebrities awash in fame and monochrome but also restrained as a result of their actions. In his following series, Dirty Pretty Things, he began to incorporate his popular use of diamond dust. The glam shots of cultural icons, glittering in pulverized diamonds, embodied the lusts and aspirations of their eras.