Rebecca Ness, born 1992 in Salem, Massachusetts, paints scenes drawn from everyday life. Her subject is people – encountered not always directly, but through the environments and objects that shape and reflect them. Her paintings are tightly composed vignettes: engaging, approachable, and layered with personal resonance. Ness’s practice is marked by a playfully self-aware sensibility, often presenting a wry performance of painting itself. She frequently depicts the artist mid-process – surrounded by the lively detritus of creation: paint tubes, palettes, discarded paper, and splattered walls – offering a vibrant celebration of materiality and the tactile life of the studio.
Influenced by figures such as Norman Rockwell, Nicole Eisenman, Philip Guston, and her artistic lodestar, Lucian Freud, Ness produces a sharp yet affectionate portrait of contemporary America. While engaging directly with the legacy of white male painters, she reclaims and reconfigures their visual language to assert a distinctly queer, contemporary, and personal perspective. Ness paints her own world – queer, contemporary, and emotionally charged. Her sitters – friends, partners, and members of her Brooklyn community – occupy the pictorial space with a sense of authority and agency historically reserved for canonical subjects in Western art. Ness explores queer identity with a lightness of touch, technical precision, and visual wit. Her work is imbued with warmth, humour, and a sharp eye for the emotional texture of modern 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, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Cologne, Germany, and Seoul, Korea. 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; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, CA; Denver Art Museum; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Yale University Art Gallery; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection; as well as international collections including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; M Art Foundation, Shanghai; Albertina Museum; Wien, Austria; Long Museum, Shanghai; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Zuzeum Art Centre, Rīga, Latvia; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Dangxia Art Space, Beijing; Recharge Foundation, Singapore; and Asymmetry Art Foundation, London/Hong Kong. Ness artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
