NEW YORK, NY.- Marianne Boesky Gallery is presenting Nightshade, Celeste Rapone’s first solo show with the gallery. For this exhibition, the artist debuts a group of nine paintings. In her newest body of work, Rapone continues to examine the potential of painting through the human form. Drawing inspiration from her native New Jersey, Rapone seeks to communicate both personal and collective feelings of anxiety, longing, and nostalgia experienced in contemporary life. Nightshade is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York and is on view May 4 – June 11, 2022, at the gallery’s 507 West 24 Street location.

Rapone’s works focus on the figure, often centering on women protagonists whose bodies impossibly contort and twist up to the confines that Rapone creates within the painting, or at other times capturing a tender exchange between a pair of figures. Rapone produces her works without preliminary drawings, gradually building the compositions of her paintings through a dynamic interplay between scale, color, pattern, and the shapes of the human form.

“We are thrilled to host Celeste’s first solo show in New York and debut this new body of paintings,” said Marianne Boesky. “Celeste's works are so distinct – she works from a basis of complex formalist concerns such as surface, pattern, and color, to create her narrative paintings that both capture and evoke the complex emotions of our time.”

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 where she is now an adjunct professor in painting and drawing. Rapone’s work has been exhibited widely across the U.S. and abroad at Josh Lilley, London; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago and Georgia Museum of Art. Rapone was the 2018 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Josh Lilley in London and Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago. Her work is currently included in ICA Boston's exhibition, A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now on view from March 30 – September 5, 2022. Rapone lives and works in Chicago, IL.

I imagine these paintings as a synthesis of my everyday experience as a painter in Chicago and projected realities of women interacting within their own sets of circumstances, in many cases informed by my nostalgia for and removal from suburban New Jersey. I became really interested in negotiating these overlays as a point of entry to this work. Posing these initial narrative questions gave me something new and unpredictable to respond to in the studio. - Celeste Rapone.