Image: Rebecca Ness, Herstory, 2024, Oil on linen, 80 x 120 inches. Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection at The Warehouse Art Foundation, Dallas, TX. Image courtesy of the Artist and Morgan Presents. Photo by Alex Yudzon. © Rebecca Ness
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA) in Maine will present a solo exhibition of paintings by Rebecca Ness (b. 1992) opening April 23, 2027 and running into July. The early-career survey is the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States, bringing together paintings from the past five years alongside new work that reflects the most current developments in her practice.
Ness's paintings draw on the intimate textures of daily life, turning scenes from her immediate surroundings into quiet studies of attention, memory and connection. Her compositions grow out of careful observation — moments in the studio, time with friends and loved ones, and the rhythms of domestic spaces that came into sharper focus during periods of social isolation. The exhibition is organized around four interrelated themes: the studio as allegory; the archive, both personal and historical; nature and contemplation; and queer spaces and community building. Together, these frameworks situate her deeply personal imagery within broader reflections on community, belonging and the ways environments shape experience.
Throughout her work, Ness returns to objects that gather meaning through familiarity and use: stacks of books, belongings stored in a family basement, small groupings of cherished possessions. Labels, logos, cover designs, decorative patterns and signs of wear are rendered with meticulous care, and their arrangement echoes the logic of both personal collections and archives. What might first appear as humble artifacts of American life gradually reveal layered narratives, turning these scenes into unconventional still lifes that document the present while reflecting on how meaning is preserved and shared.
"At a time when so much of our lives is mediated through virtual experience, her paintings return us to the materiality and quiet poetry of everyday life," says Devon Zimmerman, OMAA's Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Ness, born in Salem, Massachusetts, describes the show as a "homecoming" of sorts, with all of the works to be shown together for the first time.
Ness lives and works in Brooklyn and received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and her BFA from Boston University. Her work is held in collections including the Yale University Art Gallery, SFMoMA, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Albertina Museum in Vienna and the Long Museum in Shanghai. A monograph, described as the largest survey of her work in print, will be published in April 2027 in partnership with Monacelli Press, with contributions from Zimmerman, independent curator Mark Godfrey and author Sarah L. Thornton.
