Sasha Gordon is among the most compelling younger abilities to emerge from New York’s artwork scene—an artist who rose to fame in the course of the pandemic growth but managed to solidify her place with substantial institutional recognition earlier than being picked up by a mega-gallery. First championed by rising L.A. seller Matthew Brown, Gordon grew to become final 12 months’s youngest enfant prodige for David Zwirner, who in a twist of art-world serendipity, additionally occurs to be Brown’s father-in-law. One might say issues simply stayed within the household, with a co-representation association.
Chelsea had hardly ever seen such a line for a younger artist because the one forming exterior Zwirner’s nineteenth Road gallery for Gordon’s debut solo present, “Haze”—maybe solely rivaled by Salman Toor’s just a few years earlier. Her new physique of labor, unveiled throughout the gallery’s complete house, confirmed the expertise of an artist steadily advancing towards technical mastery. Gordon continues to stability this precision with an enigmatic, open-ended storytelling and a putting potential to probe the human psyche, reaching a stage of empathic universality that solely true masters obtain.
After the frenzy of that opening week, Observer caught up with Gordon to debate how her model and technical command have developed alongside a rising consciousness of her personal visible language. She explains that she needs her figures “to be timeless—figures that you might encounter throughout various narratives.” Her storytelling, she provides, “is born from a curiosity of the ambiguous,” and he or she needs every portray linked to this bigger narrative “to have respiration room for questioning.”
Whereas she continues to make use of the canvas as a stage for exploring identification, reminiscence and cultural heritage by means of her Asian diasporic lens, Gordon clarifies that her characters aren’t strictly autobiographical. “I’ve been stepping away from making works explicitly about identification,” she says, noting that, because of this, she additionally avoids embedding know-how or clothes that may tie her figures to particular durations or settings. Nonetheless, Gordon acknowledges that she attracts from her reminiscences and daydreams, usually returning to acquainted landscapes equivalent to these of upstate New York. These works include emotional echoes she acknowledges in herself—the darker recesses of the unconscious that floor by means of portray. In any case, it’s unattainable to not venture fragments of 1’s personal self and shadow onto the canvas; it’s by means of that projection that we understand and filter the world. “At some point, I nearly felt dangerous for one of many characters who was getting hazed and having her hair pulled. It fluctuates!” she admits.
What’s most putting, particularly in individual, is Gordon’s stage of hyperrealism: the meticulous consideration to even the smallest particulars that form every composition. There’s a palpable sense of planning and management behind such obsessive precision, but this time-intensive course of additionally turns into, for Gordon, a meditative train—a strategy to confront and course of the abysses of the psyche and the shadows of the inside world. “Course of-wise, I can positively get obsessive, however I’m studying to let go,” she displays, acknowledging that her rigorous hyperrealism stems from an excessive ambition she has no intention of suppressing. “I take pleasure in spending time envisioning my compositions and rendering elaborate element.” For individuals who look intently, Gordon’s work reveal a deep pleasure within the act of portray itself—a fascination with the medium’s materiality and its boundless narrative potential.
In Pruning (2025), one in every of her most astonishingly detailed works, Gordon takes illusionism to new heights, rendering each crack and scratch of a metal-framed tank with meticulous precision. Inside it, a girl is held underwater by one other determine, as if to suffocate and suppress the repressed—to maintain that shadow projection submerged beneath the floor of consciousness.
In her works, Gordon strikes farther from conventional notions of magnificence, embracing the grotesque to depict the uncooked, usually uncomfortable dimensions of human expertise—very like Francisco Goya as soon as did. She notes that she has explored the register of worry extra overtly on this sequence. “I type of needed to take my flip making a horror sequence. The emotional depth in horror feels so actual,” she says, citing South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho’s The Host and its notorious nail-clipping scene as inspiration for It Was Nonetheless Far Away (2024). “General, I feel these work have extra brutality and violence to them than specific horror.”
Gordon’s embrace of the grotesque recollects Roger Caillois’s writings on the aesthetics of horror—notably his concept that the grotesque unsettles as a result of it mirrors the instability of the self. Caillois described the grotesque and the monstrous as ruptures of kind, the place the boundaries between magnificence and monstrosity collapse, making a fascination that’s each terrifying and seductive. In Gordon’s case, this dynamic animates figures caught between management and dissolution, empathy and cruelty—her painterly realism serving not as an escape however as an intensification of unease, compelling viewers to confront the meanings behind their discomfort. Echoing Georges Bataille, worry and fascination are inseparable, and the erotic and the violent share the identical depth of expertise. In abjection, horror turns into an area for recognition.
Her older feminine characters, particularly, seem uncannily merciless and haunting—matriarchal figures who venture a fierce, commanding presence reasonably than softness. They evoke archetypal girls implementing self-discipline with unshakable conviction. Their authority feels each nurturing and oppressive, reflecting a generational logic through which care and management are inseparable, as seen in Husbandry Heaven (2025). When Gordon started this sequence, she admits she discovered herself questioning: “Who’re these doppelgangers? And the place precisely are they? The place did they arrive from and why are they on this world?” Ultimately, she realized she didn’t must know. “Possibly they don’t must be tethered to specificity. Possibly they’re aliens or some new humanoid creature crashing all the way down to earth, and the principle character simply has no concept what she’s in for.”
On the identical time, these figures counsel a lineage of ladies whose power lies in persistence, vigilance and ethical rigidity—qualities they view as important for survival. Gordon’s girls are rendered extreme, highly effective and terrifying exactly as a result of they refuse containment. Echoing Mary Russo’s The Feminine Grotesque: Danger, Extra and Modernity, the grotesque feminine physique right here turns into a way to destabilize patriarchal norms and societal canons: in Gordon’s matriarchal figures, authority and monstrosity are two aspects of the identical survival intuition.
Gordon notes that the trio was additionally impressed by mythological archetypes such because the Fates, the Furies and the Graces, every representing totally different levels of life. “I gave them totally different personalities, which could be noticed by means of numerous options like their postures, facial expressions and haircuts,” she says. By way of these mythic echoes—and the archetype of the “unfavorable mom”—Gordon confronts private fears and traumas that floor in her course of. But her flip towards the grotesque opens a deeper inquiry into the human situation, urging viewers to face discomfort and rethink aesthetic and emotional boundaries. “My work come from my creativeness, and the compositions in Haze contemplate psychological states extra broadly.”
Certainly, the uncanny, disquieting environment of those scenes transcends particular person trauma to evoke collective anxieties—echoing the shared unease of our occasions. That is particularly evident in Petrified (2025), an apocalyptic tableau envisioning a abandoned, swamp-like panorama—a contemporary Waste Land of civilizational decay. Right here, Gordon focuses on manipulating bodily flesh by means of various textures and supplies to convey psychological stress. “My characters oscillate between ranges of consciousness – in between dissociating and feeling current,” suggesting that her scenes handle common circumstances of fragility and psychic rigidity. “Generally I need them to really feel heavy and grounded, and different occasions I need them to really feel like they’re simply melting away.”
Gordon embraces this visible ambiguity, expressing the concept actuality is rarely black or white however a steady flux of feelings and contradictions—a mutable terrain formed by notion. Her topics multiply and fragment, echoing, cloning and reflecting the self. The figures in works like Pruning (2025) stage confrontations with inner multiplicity, utilizing seemingly absurd situations to course of deeper fears and repressed feelings—the “return of the repressed,” as Freud may put it. “My storytelling itself is born from a curiosity of the ambiguous,” Gordon reiterates. “I need every portray that’s linked to this bigger narrative to have respiration room for questioning.”
That, in the end, is the essence of Gordon’s work: a fearless, ongoing inquiry into human nature by means of portray—one which resonates with viewers’ personal experiences and vulnerabilities, leaving house for reflection and empathy for the shared drama of existence in a flesh- and time-bound dimension.
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