While most four-year-olds are learning the alphabet and drawing stick figures, Aelita Andre is selling her paintings for more than $25,000.
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The Melbourne child, who has been touted as the mini Picasso by art experts in the US, has been taking to canvases with paint, pom poms and pipe cleaners since she was nine months old.
Her father, Michael Andre, who is also a professional abstract artist, claims she could create art before she could crawl and has accompanied the burgeoning abstract expressionist painter to New York to open her first ever gallery exhibition, titled The Prodigy of Colour, at the Agora Gallery in Manhattan.
The show features some of her bold, coloured works including Coral Nebula, The Dog & Alien and Asteroid, and three other pieces have already sold for over $25,000 since opening less than a week ago.
While this is the first time she has been solo in the spotlight, this is not her first sale. In 2009 as a part of a group exhibition in Hong Kong, a painting that she created when she was two years old sold for more than $22,000.
Curators say the key to her acclaim and early success lies in her splattered paint creations creating a coherent yet playful story of colours, composition and texture.
Her inspiration ranges from dinosaurs to the solar system.
"I just do this and this, but with many colours. My favourite colour is yellow," she told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper, waving her hands in circles.
"With Aelita it's one painting after another, she's very, very consistent in her work so she's already developed a style that is hers," Angora Gallery director Angela De Bello told the newspaper.
"What's interesting about her work that I find is that its abstract expressionist but she's also surrealist in the way she incorporates objects into her work and how she includes those objects."
She often incorporates bark, twigs, bird feathers and her own toys into her paintings, which gallery owners around the world say lends "depth and texture" to the overall effect of her work.
Dressed in a tutu and a headband covered in butterflies, Aelita excitedly welcomed media and interested onlookers into "her space" after a visit to the Museum of Modern Art to view the pioneers of pop art including Andy Warhol.
"There's no education, no understand of art history or of art movements, no intimidation thinking 'oh no I'm in the shadow of Picasso or Pollock or something,' so here she is, a completely and utterly innocent eye coming to a canvas," her proud father Michael Andre told WAtoday.com.au.
"So I'm looking at it from the opposite side thinking 'let's see what she does,' because I'm just so curious to see what someone in that position produces."
Follow Jenna Clarke on Twitter @JennaMClarke
