Willa Wasserman
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1990
United States
François Ghebaly
From convex still lifes and gauzy, vaporific self-portraits to impressive mise-en-scènes in polished brass and fine linen, American artist Willa Wasserman’s practice in painting and figuration is readily 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. The latter is both the lodestar and returning place in her work. 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 comprise a growing array of closely studied materials that uniquely capture the latency in Wasserman’s gestures. Equally important, they offer keen metaphors for the potentiality at the heart of her practice. Wasserman’s linseed oils age; her delicate silverpoints oxidize;
caustic reagents transform her metal surfaces into
iridescent, favrile patinas whose saturation continues
to evolve throughout the lifespans of her artworks.
With sincerity and lightness, Wasserman conducts
these phantom throughlines into tender, moving
silhouettes of sex, self, and metamorphosis.
Willa Wasserman (b. 1990, Evansville, IN) 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. Recent solo exhibitions include High Art, Paris, France (2022); François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Downs & Ross, New York (2021); Good Weather, Chicago (2020) and in lieu, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Selected group presentations include Michael Werner Gallery, London, UK (2022); Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR (2021); Downs & Ross, New York, NY (2019); Sarg ...
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2020
1990
United States
Good Weather
“Painting is very romantic, no matter how you slice it,” Willa Wasserman told [Emily Watlington] in a mid-quarantine virtual studio visit. *
Exhibition view at UCLA, Los Angeles, 2019
The Indiana-born, Los Angeles–based artist plies their chosen medium against itself, retooling historical techniques in order to critique painting’s more troubling traditions—like the tendency of artists to subsume their subjects into their own worldview. “Painting is haunted by its history,” they said, “and we have to deal with the ghosts.” *
Exhibition view at Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles, 2019
Endeavoring to emphasize the ways in which representing (and even perceiving) a subject always involves some projection on the artist’s part, Wasserman takes on the metalpoint technique as both medium and object of critique—drawing instead with brass wool. *
Exhibition view at The Gallery @ Michael's, Los Angeles, 2019
Wasserman also paints still lifes— typically flowers in vases—observing the subject not directly but in a convex mirror...[which] is decidedly not a tool used to widen the scope of the artist’s subject, but instead, to flop it, distort it, and render it less familiar. *
Willa Wasserman (b. 1990 Evansville, IN) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. They received their MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. Wasserman has recently exhibited at The Gallery @ (Los Angeles), Park View / Paul Soto (Los Angeles), in lieu (Los Angeles), Downs & Ross ( ...
