Celeste Rapone | Some Weather

509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

For inquiries, please contact James Lavender:

james@boeskygallery.com

“Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

– inaccurately attributed to Oscar Wilde

“It is precisely the superficiality of talking about the weather—of something so common, so pedestrian—that, contra Wilde, makes it a blank canvas upon which talented people can work wonders.”

– writer Dave Bry

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Some Weather, an exhibition of new work by Celeste Rapone (b. 1985; New Jersey). For her second solo exhibition with the gallery, the Chicago-based painter presents a new suite of paintings that examine the personal and professional anxieties of approaching middle age in a moment of distinct political and social upheaval. 

Imbued with autobiographical details, art historical references, and the artifacts of daily life, Rapone’s paintings embody the anxiety and longing inherent to the millennial condition. In uncannily flattened settings—surrounded by the detritus of daily life—Rapone’s figures contort impossibly within their spaces; their limbs push against architectural confines of the artist’s own making, testing the boundaries between figuration and abstraction.  

For Some Weather, Rapone presents a suite of paintings that reflect the inexorable passage of time—in terms both intimately personal and acutely political. Throughout these eleven new paintings, the riotous, saturated colors so characteristic of Rapone’s practice give way to unusually muted hues—”diet colors,” as the artist refers to them—borrowed from the influx advertisements for sensible clothing and tasteful home decor that she began receiving in the mail and on her Instagram feed as she approached the age of 40. In these diet tones—beige, navy, gold, drab olive, muted “gravender”—Rapone’s figures attend to the activities of daily life: cooking, cleaning, bathing, painting, spending time with friends. Limbs contorted within the cramped, flattened spaces the artist has created for them, these figures remain completely engrossed in—or perhaps resigned to—the tasks at hand.

Rapone is an avid student of art history, and her paintings bear the undeniable influence of her ongoing engagement with this history. Into her paintings, Rapone has frequently embedded references to various masterworks—in the form of t-shirt graphics, phone-case decals, clothing patterns, and illustrations in open books. Unlike these explicit, often cheeky, invocations of the great works of art history, Rapone’s newest suite of paintings bear the formal influence of a host of artists and artistic movements—most notably, perhaps, with Sideline (after Ben Shahn), in which Rapone draws upon the dynamic use of space, subdued palette, and peculiar orientation of bodies in the work of the pioneering Social Realist Ben Shahn’s Men on a Bench (1940).

Rapone’s litany of art historical source material is inarguably broad. She cites mid-century American painters George Tooker, Jacob Lawrence, Marsden Hartley, and Thomas Hart Benton, as well her longstanding influences Philip Guston, Paula Rego, Maria Lassnig, Francis Bacon, and the unapologetic, unrepentant emotional intensity of post-World War I German New Objectivity painting as inspiration for the paintings of Some Weather. What the artists she looks to share is an interest in examining and articulating the political and social conditions of their time. These artists bore witness to the frequently grim realities of the twentieth century; they made visible the pain of decades of global transformation. What they painted was not pretty, but it was real. As Benton once said, his murals “portray American life in the twentieth century realistically. It may be life that should be criticized; but not my painting of it...To the critical objections to my murals that they are too loud and too disturbing to be in good taste...there is only the answer that they represent the U.S. which also loud and not in 'good taste’...Every detail is a thing I myself have seen and known.”

Informed by her historic source material, Rapone, too, makes visible a reality that is loud and disturbing, capturing the latent anxiety that colors our present moment. Throughout Some Weather, women go about their daily lives—cooking, bathing, painting, lounging—the whole time steeling themselves against an unknown future. Facing the concerns of aging, the anxieties of a tumultuous political climate, the inescapable fear of the unknown—more pronounced than ever—these figures brace themselves for a grim future. This emotional fortification is perhaps most evident in Some Weather, an intimately scaled portrait from which the exhibition takes its name. In the painting, a woman in a green vinyl rain hood and a J.Crew sweatshirt stares out toward a coming storm. In her mouth, she holds a necklace adorned with multiple charms: suns, clouds, and lightning bolts.

Weather, it is often said, makes for the blandest of conversation. As writer Dave Bry once noted, the pedestrian nature of weather is precisely what makes it uniquely suited to metaphorical possibility. The phrase “some weather,” too, opens itself to possibility—encompassing everything from the height of summer to the depths of winter, from the catastrophic to the seemingly miraculous. While these figures prepare themselves for a coming storm, there remains a sense of humor and whimsy in Rapone’s newest paintings—these women relax in hot tubs with novelty drink glasses in hand, they search for guidance in Ouija boards, they draw in marker on designer boots. In this embrace of the lighthearted, Rapone reminds us that, like the coming storm, this season of anxiety and uncertainty too shall pass. 

ABOUT CELESTE RAPONE

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.