Imbued with autobiographical details, art historical references, and the artifacts of daily life, the paintings of Celeste Rapone (b. 1985; New Jersey) embody the anxiety, longing, and nostalgia inherent to the millennial condition. In uncannily flattened interiors—surrounded by the detritus of living—Rapone’s figures contort impossibly within their spaces; their limbs push against the frame, threatening to burst through the picture plane as Rapone tests the boundaries between figuration and abstraction. Rapone’s formalist concerns—surface, pattern, and color—are evident in the insistent flatness of her images, as spaces collapse and figures are pushed to the foreground, threatening to spill out toward the viewer. Frequently in the midst of action—working, reading, cooking—Rapone’s figures offer suggestions of narrative while emphasizing the very act of being observed.
Rapone’s work has been included in recent institutional exhibitions at Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; M Woods, Beijing, China; the START Museum, Shanghai, China; the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China. Rapone was the 2018 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and she earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rapone is represented by Corbett vs. Demsey, Josh Lilley Gallery, and Marianne Boesky Gallery; she lives and works in Chicago, IL.