Willa Wasserman

Willa Wasserman paints the memories that escape us, the fantasies that inhabit us, the ghosts that haunt us. Her works travel between self-portraits, intimate portraits, and subjects inherited from motif painting, where the artist seems to welcome a classical iconography, an assumed legacy of traditional artistic practices in the history of Western and dominant art, in order to better defuse it. Willa Wasserman paints nudes and bouquets of flowers, often drawn in round shapes. The “tondos” that refer to the 15th century Madonnas as much as a more domestic form of painting that was embedded in the antique moldings. The works are not always done on canvas but often on metal, a medium which allows the paint to swallow and gently reflect the light. The artist also makes use of the metal tip, a drawing technique dating back to antiquity and widely used during the Renaissance, which finely carves into the material. This process helps to disturb the image, to abstract the figurative. To make what has been lost or erased invisible, as if to better honor that which is absent.