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Surface Tension by Roma Devanbu
ROMA DEVANBU
SURFACE TENSION
July 3 – August 2, 2026
Second Saturday Reception July 11th, 5-8 PM
Roma Devanbu has been making and exhibiting her paintings and mix-media work for decades. In Surface Tension, her first exhibit exclusively of photographs, we see her hungry painters eye hunting and gathering brush marks, patterns and textures in the wide world around her.
Devanbu says “Inside the studio I manipulate materials. I rub, tear, fold, cut, glue and paint to create images on paper and canvas. When I leave the studio my creative actions gain a broader context and I understand my gestures as echoes of larger elemental forces acting on natural and man-made surfaces.”
The photographs in this exhibition are records of a physical world in which materials collide, collaborate, stretch, erode, rust, scratch, drape, freeze and embrace.
The subjects are approached in an unapologetically straight forward manner, presenting the plain facts within the scope of her viewfinder. But, each title includes a date and time, down to the second, reminding us that the unique set of circumstances is temporary and will be disrupted by the influence of reorganization or entropy.
The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of the gallerist/photo historian Alan Klotz and the photographer/educator Philip Perkis. Devanbu first met and studied with Klotz and Perkis while earning her MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in the mid 1980’s.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Roma Devanbu is a long time member of Axis Gallery and its current president. She is a studio resident at Verge Center for the Arts. Devanbu holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, an MFA from Pratt Institute and studied Asian Art History for one year at the University of Baroda in India. She was a full time tenured faculty member at Bergen Community College in NJ before moving to Davis, CA where she lives with her husband, the computer scientist Premkumar Devanbu. Her work is in private and corporate collections in the US and abroad and can be seen in many Northern California hospitals. For more info visit her website at roma.devanbu.com.