BERLIN.- Esther Schipper announced the representation of Celeste Rapone.
The eccentric figures that populate Celeste Rapone’s paintings allegorize the generational unease, anxiety, and ennui peculiar to millennials. In a recurring compositional gesture, bodies are positioned in contorted and crammed poses. Their limbs press against the edges of the canvas, poised to burst the picture plane. As they rub against the frame, these figures appear to thrive and ache at once.
Rapone works without preliminary drawings. Moments of hesitation, doubt, discontent, and revision cut across the layers of paint she applies to the canvas. Yet the autobiographical allure of her work extends beyond her technique: each painting is a narrative feast and their protagonists function as alter egos. Her upbringing in New Jersey sets a mis-en-scène tempered with nostalgia and vibrant shades. Recent works cite a muted palette of greige, referencing fashion and interior design advertising that began to pop up in Rapone’s digital feed as she approached her fortieth birthday.
Much like her intriguing autobiographical avatars, the domestic interiors Rapone depicts are subject to surreal montages while spiked with nods to art history. In her paintings, domestic labor, Sunday lunch and midnight rendezvous accessorize representations of women that reference social codes of female subjectivity. These references are transposed onto the circumscribed flatness of the canvas, where, as the artist explains, “the idea of women contained, occupying impossible positions anatomically, but also in terms of expectations, ambition, defeat and self-awareness,” comes into focus.
The artist will have her first solo presentation with Esther Schipper on occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin in Spring 2026.
Celeste Rapone continues to be represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Marianne Boesky Gallery and Josh Lilley.
Celeste Rapone was born 1985 in New Jersey, USA. Rapone graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, and in 2013 she completed an MFA at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. The artist lives and works in Chicago.
In 2018, Rapone was awarded with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In 2013, she was awarded a Teaching Fellowship at the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she continued to teach through 2023. She was a Nominee for the 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellowship.
Selected institutional exhibitions and projects include: Atrium Project, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Spring 2026); Celeste Rapone, Esther Schipper, Berlin (upcoming); Presence as a Pause: Interiority and Its Radical Immanence, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (2023); Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and New Historicism, Lehman College, New York (2023); Odalisque, Bunker Art Space, West Palm Beach (2023); A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2022)..
Rapone's work is held in the following collections: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Speed Art Museum, Louisville; M Woods, Beijing; START Museum, Shanghai; Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, among others.
