Celeste Rapone Studio Visit

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Celeste Rapone's compositions are spatially complex and require time to unpack – details (often hilarious references to popular or mass cultural objects and their attendant packaging) jostle with general forms (bodies, landscape, architecture) in ways that surprise and delight the careful viewer. Rapone paints alla prima, applying her materials directly, with no preparatory sketches, so the metaphor of over-preparedness that permeates these scenes is, for her, in an inverse relationship to her method of image-making, which is highly improvisatory and intuitive, starting with very basic color or shape ideas and building from that. She's thinking about painting strategies, history painting, the big picture in all senses. "What I was interested in with a comparison to chess is how in painting you make a series of choices and can't be sure how they'll unfold or respond to one another," says Rapone. "You keep going and try to enter from different angles until something opens up. And many times you lose. But then you get to try over and over and over again."

Celeste Rapone (b. 1985, New Jersey) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Her work has been exhibited at Esther Schipper Gallery (Berlin), Josh Lilley Gallery (London), Marianne Boesky Gallery (NYC), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery (Luxembourg), Roberts Projects (LA), Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston), Julius Caesar (Chicago), The Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens), and Monya Rowe Gallery (NYC). Her work is held in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Mill, Westport, NY; M Woods, Beijing, China; among others. In 2026, Rapone was awarded the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she is a 2018 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She lives and works in Chicago, IL