Star Baby reveals a butterfly as luminous, otherworldly, emerging from a fantastical landscape. RF transforms the photographic image into a richly saturated composition of electric greens, deep blacks, vivid blues, with flashes of orange, creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously natural and dreamlike.
The butterfly’s dark wings are hand-finished by the artist with diamond dust and sparkles, which catch the light like a celestial constellation. Against a glowing, painterly backdrop, the butterfly’s crystalline presence feels like a small star has landed in a garden.
Roberta Fineberg’s lens-based practice moves freely between photography and abstraction, the hand made and painterly, she uses color, texture, and materiality in transforming an image. A familiar butterfly becomes a fantastical creature: part photograph, part painting, part jewel-like object.
Star Baby Butterfly, 2026
by Roberta Fineberg
Mixed media: Photography (Pigment Print) on baryta paper
Diamond dust and sparkles, hand-applied by the artist
Edition of 1
Signed, dated, and titled by the artist
Image: 8 × 8in
Ships matted: 11 x 14in
Provenance: RF Studio
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Artist's Bio:
Roberta Fineberg (RF) is a New York-based visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores serendipity, experimentation, and the evolution of ideas through color, material, and process. Working across photography, drawing, installation, video, and abstraction, she investigates themes of impermanence, play, memory, and transformation. Embracing chance as an essential creative force, her work invites viewers to reconsider the relationships between observation, experience, and the physical world.
Fineberg’s exhibitions include Women of Spirit at Zurcher Gallery, New York (2025); Gallery128, New York (2025); Collecting: An Art Fair at Westbeth Gallery, New York (2024); Sojourner Gallery, New York (2022); Phyllis Harriman Gallery (2020, 2022); CADAF Online Art Fair (2020); Gallery122, New York (2018); Curate NY (2013); and Photos, Femmes, Féminisme at Paris Photo (2010). Her work is held in public and private collections, including portraits of women writers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris. In 2022, her photograph Double Helix was featured in Sotheby’s Contemporary Discoveries preview exhibition in New York.
Recent commissions include twenty pigment prints from her Roman God(dess) series for the Orient Express Hotel in Rome (2025). Her work Union, from the Butterfly Series, was selected for Butterfly: Exploring the World of Lepidoptera (Phaidon, 2025), and in 2026 three works from the series were released as curated digital editions on Sedition.
RF began her career in Paris in the 1980s as an editorial photographer and freelance writer. Her photographs have appeared in international publications including Le Monde, Paris Match, Ms., Jeune Afrique, among others. She is also the author of City Riders: A Story of Riding and Friendship (Howell/Macmillan, 1997).