Jesse Bercowetz is an American artist whose multifaceted practice incorporates sculpture, painting, collage, drawing, and installation. His work emerges from the long mythic history of objects and images created to carry power and the weight of the unconscious—vessels, skulls, serpents, and forms built to outlast their moment. His works function as talismanic engines—part object, part spellcraft—vibrating with a presence that feels summoned rather than made.
His materials arrive with their own weight and histories—wood, metal, plaster, raw pigment, fragments, things that feel weathered, handled, or excavated. At times, vivid colors cut through these surfaces- an electric interruption that shifts the psychological temperature of the work and intensifies the tension between the unearthed and the immediate. Bercowetz shapes these materials in ways that keep the physical world present in the object, letting edges, seams, and surfaces remain open and unsettled. Each piece moves in a state where it feels both constructed by hand and marked by something deeper and harder to define.
Bercowetz’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, with exhibitions at The Drawing Center, PS1 / The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, and The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. He has received numerous grants and residencies throughout his career, among them support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. His work has been widely covered in publications such as The New York Times, LA Weekly, Art Review, Sculpture Magazine, Artforum, and many others. Bercowetz earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is pursuing a Master of Divinity from Harvard University. He lives and works in New York City and Joshua Tree, California.