WILLA WASSERMAN

Wasserman engages questions of intimacy, gender, and metamorphosis, weaving references to classical painting and material culture with contemporary expressions of queer experience. Working on fabric and metals, the artist treats the support as an active participant in each composition. Oil, silverpoint—traces drawn through the friction of silver on a primed surface—and chemical processes are applied in ways that allow oxidations, stains, and tonal shifts to surface and remain legible. She approaches figuration without emphasizing bodily clarity or sharply defined contours, favoring instead amorphous spaces in which forms drift and dissolve. Historical techniques are reimagined to give rise to mutable bodies and atmospheres that are at once luminous and dark, suspended in a state of continual emergence.

For several years, Wasserman has worked through still life as a way of thinking visually, treating objects as a form of quiet composition rather than symbolic display. She paints flower arrangements and garden scenes, such as From the garden at the new squat (2026), where pigment seems to merge with the metal surface, giving the images a quiet, ambient depth. In Still life with purple apple, empty bowl, lock rake (2026), the lock rake introduces a note of transgressive access, referencing lived experiences of trans identity and ways of navigating spaces beyond normative structures.