Sosa Joseph Devil’s hour, by the river, 2025
Some landscapes are not merely seen, but remembered. In Sosa Joseph’s canvases, rivers overflow, rain does not simply fall; it seeps into bodies, homes, and time. These paintings do not so much narrate the past as they establish a state of memory that revives it. Figures sometimes become distinct, sometimes fade; like memories, they oscillate between clinging and vanishing. Read more.
Installation view, Dan Flavin: Grids, David Zwirner, New York, January 15–February 21, 2026.
Courtesy David Zwirner
Visiting David Zwirner’s new Dan Flavin exhibit feels more like exploring an incandescent expanse than walking through a gallery. Every room contains just one or two of his fluorescent installations, giving each of them the space to settle and saturate the ceiling and walls. The ongoing exhibition focuses on Flavin’s grid pieces, which are a denser and more complex development of the spare, one or two-bulbed installations that first brought the artist to recognition.
Flavin called his works “situations,” a term that underscores their interdependence with space and context. The word also hints at their delicacy: the light bulbs can always be switched off, the lamps replaced. What matters is not the bulbs themselves, but your experience encountering them: the bulbs of colors radiating off the grids, suffusing the white walls, and one’s own body drifting through the space.
The first room holds the artist’s 1987 untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery) — one of many pieces dedicated to his longtime dealer, Leo Castelli. Three identical, five-by-five grids adjoin, and each horizontal lamp glows in one shade of the rainbow. On the floor below, the images reflect on the concrete, radiating in an ombre duplicate.
As you walk closer to the structure, the reflection on the floor recedes. As you retreat, the ombre reemerges. The grids themselves are not changing, of course, but your image of them does. Perception reveals itself to be—to use Flavin’s word—situational.
Behind the installation, a purple-pink light bathes the wall. Flavin has been described as a painter because of the way his installations color everything near. But painting feels slightly too vague and inexact as an analogy. The light is soft and diffuse. The neon grids light the walls, saturating them in radiant pastel shades so definitively that they erase the boundary between artwork and space.
In the following room, two grids appear in adjacent corners with opposing color schemes. One is pink and green; the other is blue and yellow. Each reflects the opposite color combination on the wall behind (the pink/green one has a blue/yellow reflection, and vice versa). Whereas in the previous work, you encounter the effect of the light and its source simultaneously, here you first encounter the effect, and only upon walking up close to the grid can you notice that there are lightbulbs on the backside, responsible for the reflection.
Installation view, Dan Flavin: Grids, David Zwirner, New York, January 15–February 21, 2026.
Courtesy David Zwirner
Flavin’s work centers on a compelling paradox: the grids themselves occupy very little space, yet his work fills the entire room. They implicate their container in the completion of the work itself. This use of light set him free from the boundaries of a canvas or 3D form.
His oeuvre also ensnares the viewer’s body as a significant part of the encounter. If you stand close enough, you’ll feel the warmth of the electricity. And if you stare long enough, your eyes will see an afterimage.
Flavin disliked it when critics overanalyzed his work or ascribed excess meaning to it. There’s humor in the fact that he chose a medium at which you’re discouraged from looking for too long. But if you do, you’ll notice an afterimage; it isn’t quite the work itself, but it isn’t entirely separate from it either.
Dan Flavin: Grids is on view through February 21 at David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, New York.
Sasha Gordon
Flame Like Blush, 2024
Oil on linen
60 x 60 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
On an unpleasantly hot and humid September evening, unfazed and well-dressed New Yorkers filed into David Zwirner Gallery, where the latest work from Brooklyn-based artist Sasha Gordon is on view.
Last year, David Zwirner and Matthew Brown announced that they would co-represent Gordon. While still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, she showed some work with Brown and began her rise to prominence. Most recently, she had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
Haze consists of seven paintings that turn inwards, probing Gordon’s complicated relationship with herself. Her hyperrealist self-portraits, often using neon hues, almost seem to glow. And she includes surreal splashes: a chain of tiny, floating rocks tethered to the one she sits on or the straps of her LED-lit tank top floating off into the canvas. The effect sometimes evokes science fiction, as if a UFO might just drift into the next canvas.
Gordon brazenly pushes past the surface of her image, instead foregrounding the cruel and varying personas of her psyche. That these works are on exhibit and available for an audience to view feels incidental to their purpose.
Sasha Gordon
It Was Still Far Away, 2024
Oil on linen
72 1/4 x 96 1/8 inches"
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
In It Was Still Far Away, a figure in Gordon’s likeness, wearing a white tank and mesh shorts, sits on a picnic blanket as a neon-orange mushroom cloud bursts behind her. As the bomb explodes, she clips her toenails, headphones on.
On the subway, waiting for a coffee, and before closing our eyes at night, our screens bring every global disaster to our door. And it seems that even our language has fallen behind; words like catastrophe and tragedy imply an anomaly, but what if watching war and famine and genocide unfold has become as quotidian as eating, working, and sleeping?
In Trance, a close-up of Gordon’s distorted face, painted in fluorescent gray, shows her eating a nail clipping. Below, a hand that’s speckled with more nail clippings is held out like an offering. In some ways, this painting of a hard-to-break habit feels more revealing than any of her nudes.
In the following room, the paintings turn increasingly self-lacerating. In Whores in the Attic, three nude women with oblong breasts, sturdy legs, and skin dimpled like the texture of the moon, stand insolently in front of the other Gordon, peeking out from behind a door. One of the antagonists haughtily smokes a cigarette while the other two gaze with scorn.
Sasha Gordon
Whores in the Attic, 2024
Oil on linen
96 1/8 x 78 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
Her thorny relationship with herself turns even more torturous. In Pruning, one of the antagonizing personas is holding another Gordon underwater inside a glass box, her skin illuminated a brilliant green-blue. The underwater Gordon stares straight ahead, directly confronting the viewer, while her knees have cracked the corners of the glass. Some air bubbles, rendered with stunning technical precision, float up to the surface.
In the exhibit’s final painting, Husbandry Heaven, set against a mint-green and grey swirled backdrop, one version of Gordon forces food into the mouth of another, hands bound behind her back. Ashes float down from somewhere, smoke drifts across in swirls, and fragments of other selves are perched on floating rocks. Unlike the former paintings, this one has a distinct tenderness. For all her looks of scorn and ridicule, Gordon never abandons herself, and one is left wondering what love and care for oneself might look like.
Haze is on view through November 1 at David Zwirner Gallery 537 West 20th Street, New York.
Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1992, Oil on canvas in two (2) parts, 102 3/8 x 157 3/4 inches, 260 x 400.7 cm
Joan Mitchell, Row Row, 1982, Oil on canvas in two (2) parts, 110 1/4 x 157 7/8 inches, 280 x 401 cm
Installation view, Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me, David Zwirner, New York, 2019. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1974-1975, Oil on canvas in three (3) parts, 8 5/8 x 19 1/8 inches, 21.9 x 48.6 cm, Framed: 17 3/4 x 29 3/4 x 2 inches, 45.1 x 75.6 x 5.1 cm
Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers, 1990-1991, Oil on canvas in two (2) parts, 110 1/4 x 157 1/2 inches, 280 x 400.1 cm
Installation view, Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me, David Zwirner, New York, 2019. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Installation view, Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me, David Zwirner, New York, 2019. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Joan Mitchell’s “I carry my landscapes around with me” is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s multi-paneled paintings created across four decades. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career through her inventive interpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color. Her emotionally charged compositions evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. The horizontally oriented, panoramic expanse of Mitchell’s polyptych panels is ideally suited for landscapes—a poignant subject for the artist that she linked directly to memory. The exhibition features paintings from both public and private collections, as well as works drawn from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. “I carry my landscapes around with me” is on view through July 12 at David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner New York.