The Exhibit | Artist Biography | Images | Events

A Symbol or a Monument presents the work of Kristopher Raos, an artist whose practice transforms the overlooked fragments of the built environment into distilled forms that carry cultural, emotional, and historical weight. Street signs, architectural surfaces, posts, and commercial remnants—elements often dismissed as background noise—become the foundation for shaped canvas (es) and constructed forms that hover between abstraction and objecthood. Raos invites us to consider how these familiar details, through repetition and memory, can shift from symbols into monuments, from the fleeting to the enduring. 

Raos’s process is rooted in active observation. He spends time walking and driving, scanning his surroundings for discarded, abandoned, or repurposed materials, what he calls “visual and physical litter.” Small objects may travel back to the studio in his pocket, while others are preserved in an extensive photographic archive. These fragments are never replicated one-to-one. Instead, he exercises creative freedom to reimagine them, distilling their essence into artworks that are unmistakably his own. The result is not documentation but transformation—a body of work that captures the spirit of an object while granting it new purpose and presence. 

Formally, Raos’s art is rooted in hard-edge abstraction, yet infused with the visual language of commercial signage, industrial design, and street culture. His meticulously crafted surfaces often evoke corrugated metal, embossed plastic, reflective coatings, and industrial finishes, mimicking the materials of real-world objects while stripping away their corporate branding. Bold colors, clean edges, and dimensional layering create the impression of manufactured precision, though each piece is entirely handmade. This approach recalls the clarity of form in Ellsworth Kelly and John McLaughlin, the material sensibilities of Donald Judd, and the cultural reflections of Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode, while filtering these influences through a contemporary, street-savvy sensibility shaped by graffiti, auto body shops, and storefront aesthetics. 

At its core, Raos’s work is about elevation and transformation. By borrowing from the visual vocabulary of mass-produced goods and signage, he calls attention to the environments that shape working-class life. His large and small paintings resist nostalgia but embrace the emotional resonance of what remains. They challenge distinctions between high and low art, studio and street, formalism and personal narrative. A Symbol or a Monument recasts the worn details of daily life as visual standards, markers of place and identity that prompt us to reconsider what is worth preserving. When experiencing this exhibition, look closely at the textures, contours, and forms before you. In them, you may find not just traces of the familiar, but a deeper story about the places we inhabit and the meanings we leave behind. 

Kristopher Raos (b. 1987, Bakersfield, California) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work renders the visual language of commerce—logos, street signage, commercial iconography—and urban fragments with painterly precision and sculptural invention. Through large- and small-scale paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Raos evokes a quiet nostalgia for the material culture of both personal memory and mass production. 

Employing shaped canvases, meticulous brushwork, and a minimalist vocabulary of form, color, and surface, Raos navigates a space that resists straightforward figuration, representation, or abstraction. Instead, he embraces a poetic bricolage where reproduction is deliberately imperfect and mimetic realism is subverted. His works offer “snatches of everyday life” that are abbreviated and recontextualized, distilling moments into objects that hum with ambiguity and allure. These paintings do not seek to represent reality but to reinterpret it, creating tension between presence and illusion, between what is seen and what slips away. 

Raos’s practice began in graffiti and transitioned to studio painting in 2011. Influenced by hard-edge painting and West Coast modernist aesthetics, his work is grounded in the visual strategies of concrete poetry and abstraction. Raised between Bakersfield and Mexico City, his formative years were marked by solitude, rich visual environments, and an early fascination with material culture—elements that continue to inform his practice. 

Exhibition Tours  

Free with your BMoA Membership

Saturday, October 11 
Friday, November 7
Saturday, December 13 

Artists on Artists: David Kimball Anderson & Kristopher Raos

Saturday, November 8 
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm  

Join us for a special conversation between exhibiting artists David Kimball Anderson and Kristopher Raos as they discuss the ideas, influences, and environments that shape their work. From the material and cultural landscapes of California’s Central Valley to the poetics of form, memory, and signage, both artists explore how place imprints itself on artistic practice. Moderated in a casual, dialogue-driven format, this program invites audiences to listen in as Anderson and Raos reflect on their respective creative processes, evolving bodies of work, and the points at which their practices intersect. A Q&A with the audience will follow.