BIO

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Deborah Wasserman is a Brazilian-born painter whose work explores landscape, ecology, migration, and displacement through layered material processes. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she grew up in the Middle East and currently lives and works in Queens, New York, one of the most diverse places in the world.

Wasserman is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. She also participated in Artists in the Marketplace at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and received two fellowships from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

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Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States at the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, White Columns, Pierogi 2000, Socrates Sculpture Park, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, and A.I.R. Gallery. Internationally, she has exhibited in Brazil, the Netherlands, Germany, and Israel, including participation in the Jerusalem Biennale at the Nahon Museum of Italian Jewish Art in Jerusalem.

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Wasserman has received grants and awards from the Experimental Television Center, Aljira Center for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Puffin Foundation, and the Citizens Committee for New York City. In 2020 she was a finalist for the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in the category of Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts. She is also the recipient of the Queens Arts Fund (2022, 2024, 2026), New York Foundation for the Arts.

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Most recently, Wasserman was commissioned by the New York City Department of Transportation to create a public art project. She was also invited to participate in the Xenia Residency in the United Kingdom. Upcoming museum exhibitions include the McDonough Museum of Art and the Nahon Museum of Italian Jewish Art in Jerusalem in 2026.

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STATEMENT

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I paint landscapes of rupture and repair—bridges fracture, houses sink, and trees split, yet leaf again. A wandering heroine moves through the work, embodied in the landscape itself: ridge, trunk, horizon, or blade of reflected light. She persists by becoming terrain. The land is not backdrop. It is body—at once wounded and generative, a site of fracture, refuge, and renewal.

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My paintings move between immersion and distance. I descend into dense, resistant surfaces—grainy, scraped, layered like scar tissue—then rise above them. From a bird’s-eye view the vista softens and a quiet system begins to emerge, subtly reorganizing chaos. What feels like breakage from within becomes structure from afar. Distance alters the narrative. Perspective becomes a tool for survival.

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Born in Brazil and raised in Israel, I carry colliding climates in my skin—rainforest and desert, saturation and bleaching light. My ancestors were expelled and forced to wander. Rooting and uprooting are not metaphors but conditions. Belonging is unstable ground. Land can be revoked.

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I gather fragments of place the way one gathers eggs fallen from a broken nest—displaced, fragile, still alive—and bring them together into hybrid terrains. Tropical foliage grows beside arid rock. Submerged houses stand near exposed roots. Repair remains visible. These landscapes hold the emotional geology of displacement, resilience, and survival.

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I build the paintings the way earth builds itself—by sediment. I pour, scrape, erase, and rebuild. The underpainting becomes soil—an origin point from which a world can emerge. Torn cloth and fragments of clothing surface through the paint as skin and scar, carrying traces of the human body and gestures of mourning. The surface records both abrasion and care, converting damage into structure.

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Motherhood intensified a force already present—the Mother not as symbol but as creator and destroyer. She appears in bark, wind, stone, and flood. She nourishes and she rages. Under pressure she hardens. She remains.

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Across these terrains, damage and vitality coexist. Within broken ground a feral beauty takes hold—life insisting, blooming through rupture. The land keeps breathing.