RACHEL ROSSIN

In January 2026, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York announced the acquisition of Rossin’s work as part of its 2025 acquisitions, recognising her influential contributions to painting, sculpture, and digital worlds. This acquisition was supported by the Zabludowicz Collection and places Rossin alongside a generation of emerging and mid-career artists reshaping the Guggenheim’s approach to innovative forms and cross-border perspectives.

Early years

Rachel Rossin grew up in Florida, where she began drawing, playing multiplayer video games, and learning to hack and program computer software at a young age. She describes these early activities as ways of building ‘homes’ for herself while searching for safety from a chaotic childhood and seeking neutrality in the highly gendered space of the internet. These formative experiences in both analogue art-making and digital environments laid the groundwork for her distinctive hybrid practice.

Rossin is largely self-taught as a programmer. She now lives and works in New York, where she has become a prominent voice at the intersection of painting and emergent technology.

Rachel Rossin Artworks

Rachel Rossin’s practice blends painting, sculpture, new media, and virtual reality to create digital landscapes that address the impact of technology on human psychology, embodiment, and phenomenology. The New York Times has stated that ‘Ms. Rossin has achieved something, forging a connection between abstract painting and augmented perception that opens up a fourth dimension that existed only in theory for earlier painters’.

Virtual reality and immersive installations

In 2015, Rossin’s exhibition N=7 / The Wake in Heat of Collapse at SIGNAL in New York was a virtual reality simulation employing the structure of side-scrolling gameplay to create an immersive, Oculus Rift-based experience. Her 2017 piece The Sky is a Gap mapped a room-scale virtual reality installation to move 3D time and explosions through the user’s movements. These works established Rossin as a leading figure in VR art, exploring questions of perception and embodiment within digital space.

Plexiglass sculptures and painting

Rossin also creates sculptural works from plexiglass panels embedded with imagery from her digital archive and personal mythology. Using a blowtorch, she heats these panels and uses her own body to mould them into three-dimensional sculptures. Installed and lit to emphasise their shadows, these plexiglass sculptures are often shown with accompanying augmented reality video. Her paintings frequently begin with recursive live drawing exercises in VR, which she uses as a sketchbook; with the headset on, her body vanishes, allowing for a unique mode of mark-making.

Recent major commissions

In 2022, Rossin was co-commissioned by the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to create THE MAW OF, an installation and digital artwork. This work was included in Refigured, a group exhibition at the Whitney in spring 2023. In 2024, her site-specific commission Haha Real was on view at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in Houston, Texas. Also in 2024, Rossin was honoured for the annual Young Collectors Council (YCC) Party at the Guggenheim Museum, transforming the rotunda into a hybrid virtual environment as part of the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative.

Select awards and accolades

• Honoree, Young Collectors Council (YCC) Party, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2024
• Honoree, Rhizome Benefit, 2022
• Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, 2018
• Cultural Space Subsidy Program Grant, Two Trees Cultural Affairs, Brooklyn, 2018–2021

To be kept up to date with news relating to Rachel Rossin, follow her on Ocula.

Rachel Rossin Exhibitions

Rachel Rossin has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions and galleries. Below is a selection of important exhibitions.

Select solo exhibitions

• Haha Real, Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, Houston, 2024
• Guggenheim YCC Party Artist Collaboration, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2024
• SCRY, Magenta Plains, New York, 2023
• THE MAW OF, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2022 (co-commission with KW Institute)
• THE MAW OF, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2022 (co-commission with Whitney Museum)
• Boohoo Stamina, Magenta Plains, New York, 2021
• Open World, Akron Art Museum, Akron, 2019
• Stalking the Trace, Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2018
• Peak Performance, Signal Gallery, Brooklyn, 2017
• My Little Green Leaf, Art in General & Kim Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, 2016
• N=7 / The Wake in Heat of Collapse, Signal Gallery, Brooklyn, 2015

Select group exhibitions

• Shimmer: The Angel in the Machine, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, 2026 (forthcoming)
• __Refigured, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2023
• Poetics of Encryption, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2023
• A Leap Into the Void: Art Beyond Matter, GAMeC, Bergamo, 2022
• ARS17: ‘Hello World!’, Kiasma Contemporary Museum of Art, Helsinki, 2017
• Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, 2017
• Sundance New Frontiers Program, Sundance International Film Festival, Park City, 2016

To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Rachel Rossin, follow her on Ocula.

Collections

Rachel Rossin’s works are held in the permanent collections of:

• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach
• Borusan Contemporary Museum of Art, Istanbul
• Zabludowicz Collection, London
• Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

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Website and Instagram

Rachel Rossin’s website can be found at rossin.co.

More Reading

Rachel Rossin’s practice has been featured in leading publications including The New York Times, National Geographic, The Guardian, Wired Magazine, and Al Jazeera. Her work has also been published in books such as Video/Art: The First Fifty Years (Phaidon), Chimeras, Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (Onassis Foundation), and Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century (MIT Press).

Rachel Rossin FAQs

Ocula | 2026