From convex still lifes and gauzy self-portraits to impressive mise-en-scenes on polished brass and fine linen, Willa Wasserman’s practice in painting and figuration is aligned with the world of dreams. Her images are loose and spectral—impressions plucked from the hazy essences of her sitters and various subjects, and at the same time cast in the pensive, indeterminate ambiance with which Wasserman embraces vital questions of intimacy, gender, and above all, becoming.
In figure and process, Wasserman deftly interrelates histories of classical painting and material culture with contemporary portrayals of queerness. Brass and copper sheet, silver plate, precious metalpoint, and stretched linen are part of a growing array of closely studied materials that uniquely capture the latency in Wasserman’s gestures. They offer keen metaphors for the potentiality at the heart of her practice. For example her linseed oils age, her delicate silverpoints oxidize, caustic reagents transform her metal surfaces into iridescent patinas. With sincerity and lightness, Wasserman conducts these phantom throughlines into tender, moving silhouettes of sex, self, and metamorphosis.
Willa Wasserman (b. 1990, Evansville, Indiana) lives and works in New York. She gained her BFA at Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College in 2013, and received her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2019.
