Sasha Gordon

Sometime in the summer of 1885, while van Gogh was working on one of his many masterpieces in Belgium, he grew tired of painting landscapes, village scenes, churches, and the thought dawned on him that he wanted to paint people. Specifically, he wanted to look into someone's eyes, maybe his own eyes--- as we all know, he became his own subject, and the self-portrait became a vital tool for us to understand him as both a painter and master of his era. It is a historical fact that after painting a few too many churches (his words, not mine) he wrote to his brother, Theo; "I prefer painting people's eyes to cathedrals, for there is something in the eyes that is not in the cathedral -- the soul of a person."

"Oh I totally start with the eyes," painter Sasha Gordon told me on an early summer morning in the summer of 2025, just as her solo show Haze that would open at David Zwirner that fall was beginning to take shape from her Brooklyn studio. Gordon already was a name that was on the tip of everyone's tongue, an artist on the cusp of becoming a household name in contemporary art just a few short years after graduating with a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. Solo shows with Matthew Brown in Los Angeles gained her attention from collectors and observers, and representation with Zwirner in 2024 solidified there was something special happening with the 27-year artist.

Being an observer of Gordon's series of self-portraits, seeing her works in person as well, that she begins with eyes makes a truth. Her work radiates, glows from the eyes out. Her work is luminous, part of the stars and part of the subconscious. But for all the bodily action, surrealistic gestures and raw realism of her paintings, the eyes dominate. It made me think of Ralph Waldo Emerson; he often contemplated the significance of eyes and their ability to convey deep truths. In his famed essay, "Self-Reliance," he views eyes not just as objects, but as metaphysical tools highlighting perception and intuition: how one "sees" the world. This feels more connected to Gordon's vision, not just about the aesthetic of eyes, but the way a painting can examine the meaning of sight.