Vanessa Prager, 'Reflection at Sunrise, 2023 Oil on canvas. ©Vanessa Prager / Photo by Robert Wedemeyer
Vanessa Prager is an artist born and raised in Los Angeles. Prager is known for her elaborate impasto technique that creates layered and sculptural surfaces. With big, heavy, drippy canvases and what can only be referred to as extreme painting, she rejects artificial hallowed hi-def crispness and reminds us that we don’t need pure likeness to feel most present, or most deeply.
She subverts traditional techniques to re-present familiar subjects—nudes, still lifes, and portraits—all of which she offers as both veiled and distant, palpable and present, and undefined by gender. The faces she paints, and the expressions they portray, subtly reveal an often-overlooked, ordinary affect we all quietly share with the world.
Her paintings explore themes of identity, self-reflection, voyeurism and the human condition in the 21st century. Reflecting on a world remotely observed via screens, Prager's three-dimensional work is a direct reaction to that two-dimensional plane.