Rebecca Ness

The first book to survey the dynamic realist paintings of the American contemporary figurative painter Rebecca NessRebecca Ness’s oil-on-linen paintings are exuberant, densely observed portraits of everyday life: friends gathered in Brooklyn bars, cluttered studio floors, and images of the artist at work.Her tightly composed scenes are charged with visual cues and latent stories, rendering the mundane – a face lit by a laptop screen, steam rising from a coffee mug – with humor, tenderness, and a perceptive attention to the finest detail.Drawing on lineages of figurative painting from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Édouard Manet and Lucian Freud, Ness reworks the genre’s conventions through the lens of her own life as a Jewish queer woman, rendering each canvas as a record of the artist’s lived experience.Published to coincide with Ness’s first solo museum exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine, this book gathers 70 paintings made since 2020, alongside new essays by Sarah Thornton and Devon Zimmerman and an interview with Ness by Mark Godfrey.Featuring generous full-page details of her densely packed compositions, this timely monograph confirms Ness as a vital painter of contemporary life.