Celeste Rapone (b. 1985) is an American painter who lives and works in Chicago, having studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2018, and her paintings are held by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the ICA Boston. Her figurative paintings show eccentric, contorted figures pressed against the edges of the canvas, reflecting on millennial anxiety and ennui.
Celeste Rapone (b. 1985, New Jersey, USA) is an American painter who lives and works in Chicago. She 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, where she later taught as a lecturer. Her figurative paintings feature eccentric, often contorted figures pressed against the edges of the canvas, reflecting on millennial anxiety and ennui. She paints without preliminary drawings, building up and revising her compositions directly on the surface. Her more recent work uses muted palettes and draws on domestic interiors, art history and the social codes surrounding female subjectivity. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2018. Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2022) and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha (2023), and she is represented by galleries including Esther Schipper and Josh Lilley. Her paintings are held in collections including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the ICA Boston, the Speed Art Museum in Louisville and M Woods in Beijing. The painting “Save Me” (2009), acrylic on canvas, offered by TUMO Gallery, is an early work made two years after she completed her studies at RISD.
