NADA Miami 2021

At once personal, political, and painterly, Willa Wasserman’s practice produces a nuanced perspective on queer intimacies and histories of its representation through unanticipated material and pictorial expressions. Through a singular lexicon of industrial materials as varied as metal point and oil on brass, as well as sumptuously worked blackened steel–her paintings communicate a poetics of affinity across their varied dreamscapes. Cumulatively, her decisions delicately antagonize those repressive gazes that tokenize and hinder new understandings of gender and its emergent visibilities.

Willa Chasmsweet Wasserman (b. 1990, Evansville, IN; lives and works in New York) studied at Academie Minerva, Groningen, Netherlands in 2011, gained her BFA at Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College in 2013, and received her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2019. Solo exhibitions include:
Downs & Ross, New York; Good Weather, Chicago; in lieu, Los Angeles; The Gallery at Michaels, Santa Monica; UCLA; New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles; and Nothing Special, Los Angeles. Selected group presentations include: Frieze New York with Downs & Ross; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Sargent’s Daughters, New York; Downs & Ross, New York; Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles.