Ammon Rost has a practice centered on gestural abstract painting, blending a wide range of art-historical references with a personal visual vocabulary. While abstract in form, his paintings often retain traces of figuration, suggestive of faces, architecture, landscape, and symbolic shapes emerging through staccato brushwork and impastoed fields of color. These works reflect a global sensibility rooted in Rost’s transnational upbringing, balancing expressive intensity with introspective nuance. Raised in a bilingual household with an American father and Japanese mother, Rost spent his early childhood in Tokyo before moving to San Francisco at the age of eleven. His early engagement with art was shaped by manga culture, where fantastical narratives and graphic imagery informed his earliest drawing practices.
Born in 1980, Tokyo, Japan, Ammon Rost lives and works in New York. Rost received his BFA in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004.
Rost describes his practice as a continuous act of arriving. Born and raised in Tokyo, one of the core lessons he took from his childhood in a zen infused cultural atmosphere was to be present. The focus on mindfulness continues to serve as a guide and is considered to be at the crux of his art making. Rost doesn't go into painting to carry out an idea, but instead to find something out about himself. Painting for Rost is an act of self discovery. Rost speaks of life's fast pace, where one is absorbing emotional information faster than one can adequately breakdown and process. Painting becomes the place for organization. He is scanning for the ‘dearest’ moments from his experiences, and when they surface he builds a painting by placing this imagery into the work. Recent scenes of family and friends not in purely recognizable renderings, but with a looser abstract application. It’s Rosts ability to keep arriving with no expectations, that opens up space and a pathway for the content for his art to flow.
Rost has presented recent solo exhibitions at Anna Zorina Gallery (New York) and Loyal Gallery (Stockholm). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Sargent’s Daughters (New York), Wilding Cran (Los Angeles), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami). Rost is an alumni of Silver Art Projects artist residency. Rost recently completed a large-scale 25 foot commission for the Four Seasons Manhattan working with Gagosian Art Advisory.