THERE IS A MOMENT, RICHARD KING SAYS, WHEN everything clicks. When a collector steps into an artist’s studio, stands face-to-face with a painting they’ve admired from a distance and suddenly understands something they couldn’t have understood before. That moment, the dissolving of distance between audience and artist, is precisely what KingArts was built to create.
King founded his artist agency, KingArts, six years ago, almost by accident. He had spent years as a passionate collector and built close friendships with artists and gallerists along the way. His professional background was in entrepreneurship and sales, two worlds that might seem distant from the art market until you realize that selling art, at its finest, is really about relationships, storytelling and trust. The opportunity to merge those worlds came from an unlikely conversation.
KingArts is not a traditional brick-and-mortar gallery with retail space and rotating inventory. It’s an artist agency focused on a mission to accelerate the brands of master artists and storytellers shaping popular culture today. Development director Sophia Jactel, who holds a master’s degree in art history and spent several years working as an art director and graphic designer in New York City, joined King to build something more deliberate than the conventional gallery model allows.
“Artists want to focus on making the work, being in the studio and creating from inspiration,” Jactel says. “The marketing, sales and admin work can be overwhelming, so that’s where we come in.” The agency fosters relationships with galleries, secures placements at prestigious art fairs, and supports artists domestically and abroad, all while keeping the artist’s voice at the center of every interaction. Their tagline is “The Royal Treatment,” and it extends in both directions: to the artists they represent and to the collectors they cultivate.
“Our methodology is to focus on storytelling and putting the artist’s voice at the center of attention to bring the pieces to life. That way, we can foster and represent the emotional and spiritual connection that buyers and collectors are looking for,” Jactel says. “We maintain and constantly communicate with our database of collectors and buyers. We keep those relationships alive and take them along on the evolutionary journey of the artist.” One of the agency’s signature offerings is the studio visit, during which carefully vetted collectors meet an artist in person. “More often than not, when they get to meet the artist, they are more inclined to have a connection with a piece and keep coming back,” Jactel notes.
That philosophy found its fullest expression yet when King welcomed Ross Rossin to the agency’s roster. When Rossin approached King about expanding beyond portraiture into a more contemporary body of work, the partnership finally came together. “Ross had been doing portraiture for 35 years, and he wanted to branch out into a more modern oil painting style, and he wanted me to help him,” King says. “We came up with some beginning ideas and then this fantastic spring of paintings started pouring out.”
Rossin’s life story reads less like an artist’s biography and more like a novel. Born in 1964 on the banks of the Danube River in Ruse, Bulgaria, he grew up surrounded by baroque and Viennese architecture, absorbing its structure and ornament before he was old enough to name what he was seeing. He began painting at 6 and was introduced to the classical techniques of the old masters at 12. By 14, he had been admitted to the National High School of Fine Arts in Sofia and later graduated from the prestigious National Academy of Fine Arts. His training covered portraiture, anatomy, perspective, art history and aesthetics.
In the 1990s, Rossin began traveling the world and spent five years in Japan, where he painted more than 150 portraits of the country’s national leaders. The experience transformed him. He absorbed the Eastern aesthetic of minimalism, negative space and stark composition, and wove it into his European classical training, creating an unmistakably singular body of work. Discovered by European collectors while still in Japan, he was soon given solo exhibitions in France, Germany, Belgium and England. A portrait of the Lebanese Patriarch painted during this period now hangs in the Vatican.
In 2001, Rossin moved to the United States with his wife, Ava, and their newborn son, arriving with little more than canvas and paint. Atlanta embraced him. The United Nations invited him to display a solo exhibition at the Palace of Nations in Geneva. Today, he holds more paintings in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery than any other living artist. A 9-foot bronze statue of Hank Aaron, which he sculpted, stands behind home plate at the Atlanta Braves’ Truist Park. In 2025, he was awarded a Grammy for Best Audio Book, Narration and Storytelling Recording as co-producer of Jimmy Carter’s Last Sundays in Plains: A Centennial Celebration. A feature documentary about Rossin’s life, Butterflies on Everest, recently premiered at the Vienna Film Festival; a second documentary in production is focused on his years in Japan.
Rossin’s newest works, the metamodern paintings he is creating now, represent the next chapter of that extraordinary career. Metamodernism follows the logic of art history. “If you look through art history, all of the art movements are a reaction against the preceding movements, which is exactly how philosophy works,” King explains. “We’re in metamodernism right now.” Where postmodernism deconstructed and doubted, metamodernism oscillates, holding contradiction and sincerity simultaneously, reaching for meaning without pretending certainty is possible. “Once I realized what metamodernism is, I saw it everywhere, and Ross is one of its most profound interpreters,” King says.
In these paintings, Rossin pulls back the curtain on contemporary life, placing ancient mythologies in dialogue with the defining pressures of the modern world. Our emerging space-faring civilization, AI and hyper-connectivity all find their way onto his canvases. One work places an iPhone in the ancient territory of the moon, blurring the boundary between what is real and playful fiction. He draws on classical symbols, like the Pieta and the Three Graces, to explore the inadequacy of cultural traditions to provoke enlightenment and presents us with a new language of visual koans. “His work is beautiful to look at on its own, but it invites you to look a little closer,” King says. “He’s also not afraid of representing himself in his work, of challenging his identity as an artist with a capital A. Many artists don’t face that head on.”
Rossin currently has close to 30 new works. While KingArts primarily sells direct to collectors, it’s actively seeking a couple of prestigious art galleries to represent this new collection with the care and intentionality it deserves. Contemporary portrait commissions, contemporary paintings and limited edition prints in four sizes are available, the latter offering a meaningful entry point for younger collectors who are just beginning to build a collection.
Visitors can explore Rossin’s work on the KingArts website, where each painting is accompanied by an artist’s statement and, in many cases, Rossin’s own voice reading it aloud. Those interested in a studio visit can submit an inquiry through the site’s contact form. “He’s an amazing guy,” King says. “Very humble. A world-class talent and deep intellectual. His life story is a Hollywood adventure movie.” Sign up for his newsletter, and you can follow wherever his story leads next. *
Robin Howard is a freelance writer in Charleston. See more of her work at robinhowardwrites.com.
