Jeffrey Wasserman

d. 2006, Millerton, New York

Born in Westchester County, New York, to first-generation American parents of Russian Jewish descent, Jeffrey Wasserman developed an early interest in art after discovering a copy of Art Treasures of the Louvre by René Huyghe. This initial exposure as a young teenager and frequent visits to Manhattan’s museums cultivated a deep and lasting engagement for Wasserman with the visual arts. While still in high school, he studied under the Color Field painter Friedel Dzubas, who introduced him to key figures of modernist abstraction and their techniques—from Willem de Kooning’s gestural mark-making to Hans Hofmann’s color theory.

Wasserman received his BFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1968. Shortly thereafter, he was employed as a studio assistant to the abstract painter Edward Avedisian. When Avedisian relocated upstate, he sold his Lower East Side studio to Wasserman, placing the young artist at the epicenter of New York’s burgeoning SoHo art scene in the 1970s.

During this period, Wasserman developed a distinctive abstract language marked by vibrant color, spatial experimentation, and playful, often cartoon-like forms. His work from this decade reflects a broader cultural moment in which artists explored the expressive potential of abstraction to engage with the familiarity and immediacy of everyday life. Wasserman sought to defamiliarize the mundane, using abstraction as a means of eliciting memory, emotion, and sensory recognition in the viewer. In the early 1990s, Wasserman relocated to upstate New York. This geographic shift ushered in a new stylistic phase in his practice. The recurring motifs of his earlier compositions gave way to dense, atmospheric surfaces composed of scraped and layered pigment. These later works evoke the natural light and landscape of the Hudson River Valley, gesturing toward a contemporary sublime.

Throughout his career, Wasserman remained deeply committed to interrogating the limits and possibilities of painting. His sustained engagement with the material and conceptual dimensions of the medium earned him the respect of peers and patrons alike, many of whom regarded him as a quintessential “painter’s painter.” Wasserman has been the focus of three exhibitions at Rosenberg & Co. The artist's estate is represented by Rosenberg & Co.