Until November, David Zwirner is showcasing the blockbuster show Haze, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with New York–based artist Sasha Gordon. On view at the gallery’s 19th Street location in Chelsea, the exhibition debuts a new cycle of paintings that examine the origins of Gordon’s surreal narrative worlds. Through her signature amalgamation of hyperreal figuration and psychological intensity, Gordon constructs a fragmented, introspective horror story that places her recurring alter ego at its core.
Executed in luminous, saturated hues and layered with translucent oils, Gordon’s paintings use her own image as a shape-shifting protagonist. In Haze, her self-rendered figure navigates a series of fantastical and unsettling scenes that mirror the ambiguity of internal experience. Throughout the cycle, the figure is mirrored, multiplied, obscured, or distorted—moving through spaces that do not obey logical continuity and kindle an uncanny cinematic suspense. The exhibition’s title refers to this pervasive atmosphere of ambiguity, disorientation, and psychological layering that runs through the paintings. Gordon pits her central figure against three antagonists in a loosely structured horror plot that unfolds with emotional intensity, dwelling in moments of vulnerability, confrontation, and quiet rupture.
The sequence begins with It Was Still Far Away (2024), where an unnamed explosion ignites an orange-red sky. The central figure, cast in the role of the “final girl,” stands at the edge of an unfolding threat. The narrative continues through a series of charged scenes that culminate in Pruning (2025), a claustrophobic composition in which the protagonist is submerged in an aquarium, held down by another figure. Her knees crack the glass as she stares outward, confronting the imminent possibility of death, as if being forced into a Damien Hirst formaldehyde sculpture. As with all of Gordon’s work, the image is as psychologically vivid as it is technically precise.
For more information, please consult David Zwirner’s website here.
Last Updated on October 21, 2025
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About the author:
Maxim Foucquet is a curator, art critic, and contemporary artist residing and working in Belgium.
