27/05/2026
Eliza Douglas, GHOSTS
curated by Francesco Bonami
Gagosian, New York
May 12-July 31, 2026
Eliza Douglas’ works have been described as “meta-paintings” that display an awareness of their own status and history. Borrowing from the iconographies of advertising and popular culture, which she sometimes blends with gestural abstraction, the artist continually reminds viewers of art’s status as a consumable good.
For her first solo exhibition in New York, Douglas reworks existing paintings that she exhibited over ten years at her French gallery, Air de Paris. She combines these with photographs taken by her aunt, Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist who has been reporting on UFOs and “otherworldly phenomena” for decades. In 2025, Kean began taking selfies that she believes contain evidence of unexplainable effects. These images often position their maker against a night sky into which enigmatic visual elements intrude. In GHOSTS, Douglas superimposes manipulated UV prints of these images onto her own paintings, partially veiling them. The exhibition also contains echoes of ‘Haunted Realism,’ a 2022 group show at Gagosian exploring the notion of ‘hauntology‘—a term coined by Jacques Derrida that denotes a state of temporal overlap in recent culture in which the past is not dead but continues to haunt the present.
Douglas has long experimented with the ideas of appropriation and doubling that shape this exhibition. The very titles of some of her previous exhibitions and projects—Josh Smith, Guggenheim, THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL, even Gagosian—hijack those of significant artists, institutions, and galleries. Yet the current exhibition represents the first time she has incorporated a cannibalizing ouroboros into her own production, eating an extant body of work to create something new. Acknowledging the constant repackaging of cultural products GHOSTS illuminates, in the words of theorist Mark Fisher ‘those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.’
Also included in GHOSTS is a black-and-white photograph of Florence Bonnefous, founder of Air de Paris.
On view through July 31st.
