top of page

Rachel Weiswasser is a New York City based painter. She started painting as a teenager after a visit to an art supply store in upstate New York with her dad. She was drawn to chalk pastels and the way color could be layered, either blended into softness or left raw and broken. That early attention to material and color still shapes her approach.

 

Weiswasser paints bodies, but not in a symbolic or idealized way. Her interest comes from personal experience: living with epilepsy and undergoing open-heart surgery. She became deeply aware of the body’s instability, fragility, and weight. Painting is her way of staying present, giving form to sensation, memory, and physicality that cannot always be described.

 

She works in oil and uses a pointillist approach. She builds forms through repeated dabs, marks, and layered patches of color. Weiswasser paints abstracted realism, but detaches meaning by squinting at the image to reduce it to its basic shapes and tonal relationships. This allows her to bypass any learned associations and focus on what is visually in front of her.

 

Her palette varies intentionally: sometimes her parameters include working with two or three colors, other times she uses a multitude of colors. She avoids blending on the palette and instead lets colors mix optically on the canvas through layering. Forms often shift, fragment, or dissolve.

 

Weiswasser is in private collections worldwide and has exhibited multiple times in New York and California. She graduated from NYU with a degree in Art History and Creative Writing.

 

Weiswasser holds an MA in Art History from University College London. There she focused on visual culture, gender, and the history of how bodies—especially women’s—have been imaged and controlled. Her painting is informed by that history, but not defined by it. She returns to images like those from Paris, Texas not to make a statement, but to work through the visual logic embedded in them—letting paint challenge, obscure, or reframe what was previously fixed.

​​

EDUCATION

 

University College of London, Bloomsbury, London

Master’s degree in History of Art and Cultural Heritage, September 2022

 

New York University, New York, NY

Bachelor of Arts, Major in Art History and Minor in Creative Writing, May 2021 

 

EXHIBITIONS

 

5 Elements Artsy.com, Online Exhibition, April-July 2025
The Surreal Spectacle Art Scene West Gallery, San Diego, California, April-May 2025 Expressive Arts Saint Louis Oxford Gallery, Oxfordshire, England, September 2024 Fête Du Citron Ap Gallery, Chelsea, New York, NY, August 2024

Fluorescence Sovereign House, Lower East Side, New York, NY, March 2024

 

PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

 

California, USA

London, UK

New Jersey, USA

Washington, DC, USA

New York, USA

Adelaide, Australia

 

AWARDS & HONORS

 

Homiens Award Homiens Foundation, April 2025

One of six winners for art competition with thousands for contestants 

CaPA Scholarship Lafayette College, Easton, PA, September 2017 – June 2018

Collegiate scholarship wherein I was awarded a $7,500 stipend to use for my art

Merit Scholarship, Art Student’s League of New York June 2021 – August 2021

Competitive scholarship that covered full-time classes

 

PUBLICATIONS & PRESS

 

“Rachel Weiswasser” Divide Magazine, Issue 11, November 2024

“Rachel Weiswasser” Suboart Magazine, November 2024

“Getting Creative with Rachel Weiswasser” Friday Focus, Proskauer Rose LLP, August, 2024

“Mind Unraveled”, Hidden Truths, Epilepsy Foundation October, 2014

​

bottom of page