Josh Lilley is pleased to present How We're Doing, the third solo exhibition by Celeste Rapone (b. 1985, NJ, USA) with the gallery.

Educated and living in Chicago but born and raised in New Jersey, Rapone’s paintings are imbued with the formal sophistication of a former Art Institute lecturer and the sensitive observation of a family member and a spouse.

Her daily drive to challenge her technical capacity entails no preparatory drawing or sitters- each painting is an opportunity to explore and learn, discovering the purpose of the picture and the characters of the protagonists within it spontaneously. Behind that process of acute variation rests the years of humble repetition and solitude inherent to a committed, daily practitioner; the studio pilgrimages, the perpetual reaching for the blurry purpose of one’s work. It is through that rigour that Rapone achieves a deep honesty to her painting, where the borders of her compositions and the boundaries of her relationships are aligned. She brings an unsentimental dignity to her contorted bodies and on the characters who animate them.

For the first time in a series, Rapone’s porous studio walls have let men in and they are duly taking up space. Whether barriers or frames, foils or muses, these male figures contain a wry inventory of highly descriptive, local accuracies. From spread limbs and fleshy hand placements to earnest embraces and detached stares, each choice denotes the body language of relationship dynamics, the mileage of time spent in another’s company.

Each couple is a clenched and coiled clump of shape and mass. Rapone depicts them as barely distinct from their environment, their physiological distortions intertwined with the architecture of their setting. Their various scenes of domestic negotiation mirror the artist’s own exertions to resolve the arrangements of bodies and surfaces, objects and space. Beguiling in their posture and questioning in their gaze, Rapone’s entangled couples summon echos of our own moments of intimacy and isolation.

The recipient of the 2026 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting, Rapone is the MCA Chicago’s current Atrium Project exhibit until April 2027 and recent institutional acquisitions of her work include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Speed Art Museum, Louisville and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.