Willa Wasserman’s Art of Skepticism and Sentimentality

“Painting is very romantic, no matter how you slice it,” Willa Wasserman told me in a mid-quarantine virtual studio visit. The Indiana-born, Los Angeles–based artist plies their chosen medium against itself, retooling historical techniques in order to critique painting’s more troubling traditions—like the tendency of artists to subsume their subjects into their own worldview. “Painting is haunted by its history,” they said, “and we have to deal wit