Celeste Rapone

The Favorite debuted in Rapone’s 2024 exhibition Big Chess at Corbett vs. Dempsey. The following text is excerpted from the press release.

“In her most recent group of paintings, Celeste Rapone addresses a certain feeling of embarrassment around the public expression of ambition, especially for women. Something like the hollow conceit of public competitiveness…. (In) "spectacles" – her large-scale works… she creates images of women over-performing, reaching extravagantly for the golden ring, with ambivalent or awkward results. Rather than lampoon these figures, they are approached with a kind of oblique empathy, hoisted by their own petards. These works are composed as stage-like tableaus, with women playing oversized chess in the park, hiking up a public trail, spotlit on a proscenium, or shark fishing from a canoe.

As always, 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.”

(text credit : Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery)

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 included in recent institutional exhibitions at Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; M Woods, Beijing, China; the START Museum, Shanghai, China; the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China. R. Rapone is a 2018 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.  Rapone is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Josh Lilley Gallery, and Marianne Boesky Gallery; she lives and works in Chicago, IL.