Willa Wasserman
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
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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 ( ...
