Artist Rebecca Ness explores art history as a living, shared language in her new body of work, Inheritance. Rather than treating the past as fixed, Ness transforms familiar visual references into scenes shaped by contemporary culture, personal experience and community.
At the centre of the exhibition is a fresh reading of Édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Ness relocates the composition from 19th-century Paris to Cubbyhole, a longstanding lesbian bar in New York's West Village. The resulting scene exchanges the distance of the original for an energetic, intimate social setting.
Elsewhere, Ness draws on the illusionistic board paintings associated with William Harnett and John F. Peto. Their carefully arranged objects are reinterpreted through a contemporary corkboard format, combining fragments of art-history books with personal materials and studio references. The approach turns established artistic traditions into an active, evolving archive.
Ness's paintings suggest that cultural inheritance is not simply received; it can be questioned, expanded and made personal. By placing canonical works alongside present-day spaces and identities, the artist invites audiences to consider who gets to participate in art history--and how its narratives continue to change.
This approach points toward a more inclusive future for visual culture, where established references can inspire new perspectives and broader forms of representation.
