The Youngest Professional Painter in The World

Aelita Andre is an Australian abstract artist known for her Surrealist painting style and her young age. She was born at January 9, 2007. She began to paint before her first birthday, and her work was displayed publicly in a group exhibition when she was two. Her first solo exhibition opened in New York City in June 2011, when she was four years old. Now, She known as The youngest professional painter in the world.

Andre was born to Australian father Michael Andre and Russian mother Nikka Kalashnikova. As a baby, she often watched her parents, both artists themselves, work on canvases on the floor. She learned to paint before she could walk, when she was nine months old.

Andre's mother, believing her daughter to be a child prodigy, showed some of Andre's paintings to a Melbourne-based art curator when the girl was 22 months old. Impressed with the work, the curator agreed to include it in a group exhibition in the Brunswick Street Gallery, and he began advertising the show with Andre's paintings before he learned of her age. Although he was surprised, he kept his promise to display the work. The show opened shortly after her second birthday and also featured Kalashnikova's photography.

Andre's first solo exhibition, The Prodigy of Color, opened on June 4, 2011, at the Agora Gallery in Chelsea. It contains 24 of her paintings, each on sale for between $4,400 and $10,000. The press nicknamed her "the Pee-wee Picasso" after nine of the works sold for a total of more than $30,000. According to the BBC, these sales may make the four-year-old "the youngest ever professional artist." The Prodigy of Color will close on June 25, 2011.

Art critics have commended Andre's work, classified as abstract art, for its employment of the Surrealist techniques automatism and accidentalism. She paints with acrylics and often adds three-dimensional objects, including bark, twigs, and feathers, to the canvases. Buyers of her art at her New York show noted the paintings' simplicity and richness in texture