Luftmensch is a series of narrative paintings that developed from the Kind Monsters, exploring storytelling, artistic lineage, and the fragile nature of identity. The Yiddish word luftmensch—literally “air person”—describes someone who lives between imagination and reality.

Born in Moscow and trained among underground dissident artists during the late Soviet Union, when modernist art was restricted, I developed a practice shaped by resistance, memory, and personal mythology. After immigrating to the United States, my work evolved into narrative paintings that weave together personal history, art history, and cultural memory.

The series began in 2016 as part of a collaborative science-fiction and fairy-tale project set in a fictional Eastern European village after an apocalyptic event. A couple survives an explosion only to discover they no longer have their original faces or heads—yet they continue to love one another.

The work later gained new resonance with the war in Ukraine and now, in Israel, where much of my family originates, bringing themes of displacement, resilience, and transformation into the paintings.

Artist Bio

Alexandra Rozenman was born in Moscow, USSR. She was classically trained at the Soviet Academy of Arts for two years and later studied with artists from Moscow’s underground movement. While still a teenager, she became part of Moscow’s alternative scene of the 1980s. After immigrating to the US, she spent the early 1990s in New York, becoming a part of what later became the International Art Alliance on the Lower East Side and earning her BFA from SUNY in 1993. She later relocated to Boston, earning an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in 1998, and studying with Gerry Bergstein and Robert Ferrandini. Her paintings and drawings blend the styles and symbols of folk art, Russian Underground Conceptualism, illustration, and Jewish art.