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
​