About
Bio
Roma Soyerov is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tashkent, working across painting, ceramics, wood, and augmented reality within a metamodernist logic: sincere oscillation between control and chance. He started in street art, studied structural engineering at university while continuing to paint, and later moved fully into studio practice. He builds works as layered systems: an image made for immediate attention, concealing a second layer, sometimes activated through AR, that opens only to a viewer willing to look twice.
The method began with Aperitif (2023), an acrylic painting he considered unsuccessful and painted over rather than exhibit. It became the first work in his ongoing AR-activated series, and sold above its estimate within days of going on view in Germany. His solo exhibition PROPAGANDA (Ilkhom Theatre, Tashkent, 2025) developed the same idea further: a hidden scene of manipulation disguised as care, revealed only through AR. Audiences preferred the concealed surface to the truth beneath it, and the work recorded the highest number of AR activations in the show.
Present, an earlier painting built around knitted roots on torn canvas, had never been exhibited before 2025, and sold at that same solo show, PROPAGANDA. Soyerov has exhibited steadily since 2020, moving from early group shows to a solo exhibition in 2025 and international shows across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. His work is held in private collections in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. He is currently exhibiting in Memory remains at De Balie, Amsterdam, which opened in August 2026.
Soyerov's collectors tend to respond to work built for a second look rather than a first impression: pieces meant to be lived with and reread over time. In five years his practice has moved from group shows to a solo exhibition and an international residency, a trajectory that speaks for itself without needing a claim about price.
I still build every work around that window, and around what happens after it opens. My practice moves between two states rather than settling on one: an image built to catch the eye immediately, and a second layer, hidden, delayed, sometimes literal, that opens only to someone willing to look twice.
In the painting Root, I reconstructed a photograph of myself and my grandfather in cracked plywood. He had stopped speaking to me by the time I painted it. I painted him with tenderness anyway. The cracks weren't damage to repair. They were the honest geometry of what survives between people, and what doesn't.
The same idea runs through Zhazhda, from the PROPAGANDA series: surface first, depth later, and only by choice. A figurative scene of a border rescue, its water turned green, sits beneath an abstract painted surface, invisible until a phone reveals it through AR. Once the scene underneath was concealed, the painting became the most visited work in the show. Audiences chose the beautiful surface over the disturbing truth beneath it, without knowing they'd made that choice. That wasn't a side effect. It was the point.
I build each piece as a system of sequential reading: what a viewer notices first, what slips past, what pulls them back. I don't think meaning belongs to the artist alone. I set the conditions. The viewer completes them. I once asked an audience to find the potato that was secretly a cake. They marked their guesses right on the photograph. By the end, the image had become a map of collective doubt, made almost entirely of people who were wrong. I've also built work meant to be destroyed, then shown it in fragments. I wanted to see what would survive being broken. I still do.
That distrust of a beautiful surface comes from somewhere specific: a post-Soviet visual culture where a polished facade over an uncomfortable reality is ordinary, not exceptional. I trained as a structural engineer before I trained as a painter, and that discipline still shapes how I build: installations as systems with their own logic, using materials, wood, raw clay, salvaged plywood, chosen because they let a landscape or a community finish the work, for better or worse.
I work across painting, ceramics, wood, and augmented reality. The question underneath is always the same: what remains when a bond is torn, whether it's to a person, a place, or a version of the truth. And can what's left become something larger than the whole ever was.
Selected Exhibitions
2026 · Memory remains · De Balie · Amsterdam · Netherlands
2026 · WE SPEAK 2 · Cultura · Tashkent · Uzbekistan
2026 · Prometheus Art Weekend · INTAMT · Düsseldorf · Germany
2025 · WE SPEAK (artist-led group exhibition) · Art Station Gallery · Samarkand · Uzbekistan
2025 · PROPAGANDA (solo) · Ilkhom Theatre · Tashkent · Uzbekistan
2025 · VIRUS · De Balie · Amsterdam · Netherlands
2024 · AFTER SHOCK REVIVAL · Iceberg Gallery · Berlin · Germany
2024 · AFTER SHOCK · Vrij Paleis Gallery · Amsterdam · Netherlands
2023 · SVIVA Station (site-specific) · Sviva Art Space · Tel Aviv · Israel
2023 · Jump To Nowhere · Sisters Room Space · Tbilisi · Georgia
2022 · Perevorot (traveling exhibition) · New York · Moscow · Prague · Saint Petersburg · Yerevan