Rebecca Ness reclaims art history: “Inheritance” in New York remakes Manet and Bellows

American artist Rebecca Ness opened her solo exhibition “Inheritance” on September 10 at the Morgan Presents gallery in New York, which remains open until October 20, 2026 — and has already drawn the attention of American critics, as Hyperallergic reports, which on October 1 devoted to it the review “Rebecca Ness Stakes Her Claim to Art History”.

At the centre of the exhibition, Ness reinterprets masterpieces of art history by moving them into a contemporary context. Édouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies Bergère” (1882) becomes “A seat at Cubbyhole”: the famous Parisian bar scene is transformed into a lively scene at the legendary lesbian bar Cubbyhole in the West Village, according to the Morgan Presents gallery.

The 19th-century trompe l’oeils of William Harnett and John F. Peto are refreshed on a cork board with torn and crumpled pages from art history books and photographs of the artist herself, while “Abe’s winning punch” remakes George Bellows’s “Dempsey and Firpo” (1924) — with the legendary boxer Dempsey portrayed as an amateur boxer forebear from the Lower East Side.

Ness, born in 1992 in Salem, Massachusetts, and with an MFA from Yale, comes from the tradition of queer realists such as Paul Cadmus and Fairfield Porter, whose legacy she brings into a new painting charged with memory and identity, as Hyperallergic stresses. Her works are already held in international collections such as Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Albertina in Vienna, the High Museum in Atlanta and ICA Miami.