Rebecca Ness, born in 1992 in Massachusetts, USA, is a New York-based figurative painter whose work explores everyday life through people and the objects, spaces, and details that shape them. A narrative painter at heart, she constructs carefully staged compositions, rich with visual cues and latent stories, combining technical virtuosity with a vivid, unapologetic sense of self. Although her paintings are strikingly lifelike, Ness resists photorealism, emphasising the materiality of oil paint with visible brushwork and deliberate gesture. Her practice draws resonance from artists such as David Hockney, Norman Rockwell and, most notably, Lucian Freud, while asserting a distinctive voice rooted in her own identity and community. Her subjects – friends, partners, and members of her Brooklyn circle – are rendered with tenderness and specificity, often occupying the canvas with a centrality historically denied to those outside the traditional canon of Western art. By reworking the conventions of figurative painting through the lens of her lived experience as a queer woman, Ness reclaims a space within art history, making visible the humour, vulnerability, and humanity of contemporary life.
Ness earned an MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from Boston University. Over the past four years, she has been the subject of solo shows in New York, NY; Paris; London; Los Angeles, CA; Cologne; and Seoul. She has been included in recent group exhibitions at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, and Akron Art Museum, OH. Her work is in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, CA; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; M Art Foundation, Shanghai; Albertina Museum, Vienna; Long Museum, Shanghai; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Zuzeum Art Centre, Rīga, Latvia; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker; Dangxia Art Space, Beijing; Recharge Foundation, Singapore; and Asymmetry Art Foundation, London/Hong Kong. Ness lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
