Kristopher Raos

Kristopher Raos (b. 1987, Bakersfield, CA) is a self-taught painter based in Los Angeles. Working across painting, sculpture, and drawing, his practice examines overlooked visual systems that shape how we navigate public space and daily life, using them to probe memory, perception, and the emotional weight of mass-produced culture.

Raos begins with found or remembered forms that he distills through shaped canvases, precise brushwork, and a restrained palette. Drawn to images that feel familiar yet unstable, he employs deliberate imperfection to subvert realism, allowing fragments of daily life to re-emerge as ambiguous, poetic objects. Process remains central: he works slowly and methodically, using surface, edge, and proportion as compositional anchors to create tension between presence and illusion.

His background in graffiti and upbringing between Bakersfield and Mexico City inform his sensitivity to scale, material culture, and solitude. Influenced by hard-edge painting, West Coast modernism, and concrete poetry, Raos balances abstraction with lived experience.

Raos’s work has been featured at galleries including as-is Gallery and MaRS Gallery in Los Angeles; F2T Gallery in Milan; Baik Art in Seoul; Venus Over Manhattan, NY; The Hole, NY; and Massey Klein Gallery, NY; as well as Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles; Harpers, Los Angeles and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. In 2025, he presented his first museum solo exhibition at the Bakersfield Art Museum. Raos is represented by Charlie James Gallery.

CV (PDF)
PORTFOLIO (PDF)
ARTIST WEBSITE (LINK)