Rebecca Ness — Born 1992, Salem, Massachusetts. Lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. Represented by Carl Kostyál, London/Milan/Stockholm.

 

Rebecca Ness creates richly layered and colorful paintings that capture mundane moments of contemplation or nuanced movements frozen in time. The people in her paintings are pictured trawling the internet, washing the dishes, shaving, eating.The unremarkableness of these scenes however is what makes them interesting. In the often lonely, banality of everyday life, we recognize ourselves and in Ness’ figures we see our own experiences illustrated. Ness is known for her atypical viewpoints and bodies rarely shown in full, but rather figures fragmented or obscured by books, newspapers or clothing.

 

While many of her paintings are imagined scenes, Ness admits that her work is usually triggered by something in reality, especially as it relates to her gender or politics. 

 

“My work is created from the body of a young, white, Jewish, gay, cisgender woman who grew up in the northeastern United States. Therefore, my work inherently deals with those things, whether they are obviously present in the image or not. No matter what I make, the object came from a body with that biography.”

 

Ness received her BFA in Painting in 2015 from Boston University, where she also studied History of Art and Architecture as her minor. Ness graduated with an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2019. She has completed residencies at The Chautauqua Institution in New York and the Venice Studio Arts Program in Venice, Italy. Ness has had solo exhibitions at Carl Kostyál, London; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; and 1969 Gallery, New York and has been included in group shows at Harper’s Books, East Hampton, NY; Carl Kostyál Hospitalet, Stockholm; Anton Kern, New York; Monya Rowe, New York; Alexander Berggruen, New York; Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles; and 1969 Gallery, New York.