Sasha Gordon: Haze

In her hyperrealistic paintings, New York–based artist Sasha Gordon often renders her own likeness, conveying the self and its many guises through translucent layers of oils in electric hues. Executed with technical precision, the artist’s visceral compositions treat her own corporeal form as an unorthodox avatar that communicates subjective, psychological experience.

In her debut exhibition with the gallery, Gordon lets her surreal narratives unfold intuitively on the canvas, depicting bodies in sometimes absurd scenarios or disorienting spatial compositions and portraying faces that translate a range of feelings. In illuminating detail, she reimagines fragments extracted from her inner life while boldly envisioning worlds within worlds that bear uncanny resemblance to our own.

Encompassing a full narrative, the paintings in Haze pit Gordon’s alter ego against three antagonists in a horror plot that uncovers the artist’s disparate yet interlocking personas. The exhibition title communicates ambiguity and confusion—themes that are woven throughout Gordon’s compositions—and suggests the complex nature of reconciling one’s many selves.

The cycle opens with It Was Still Far Away (2024), in which an inexplicable explosion illuminates the sky orange-red behind the main character who embodies the “final girl” trope of horror films.

The story reaches its denouement in Pruning (2025): As the main character is trapped in an aquarium and held underwater by an antagonist, her knees press up against the surface of the tank and crack the fragile glass. Her eyes are wide open and fearful as she confronts the imminent possibility of death.

Throughout this body of work, Gordon pictures bodies in violent motion and renders minute details with precision, foregrounding the ornamental and the grotesque. The protagonist is force-fed in Husbandry Heaven (2025), her captor’s expression hesitant as fine particles of ash from the explosion shower their wrinkled, waxen skin.

In 2023, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented a solo exhibition of Gordon’s work titled Surrogate Self, and her work has been included in group presentations including Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration at The Jewish Museum in New York in 2024, and Heroic Bodies at the Rudolph Tegners Museum og Statuepark in Dronningmølle, Denmark, in 2022.

From 2023 to 2025, a work by Gordon was part of Love Languages, a thematic collection display installed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and she has two works on long-term view at the High Line’s Moynihan Connector Billboard, located on Dyer Avenue between 30th and 31st Streets.

Among the large-scale paintings in the exhibition, Gordon intersperses small portraits that likewise contemplate the emotional facets of her characters, both hinting at and obscuring their motivations. Complicating the genre of self-portraiture and engaging the canon of art history, these works express multiple psychic registers at once, addressing viewers with a candor that is both familiar and unsettling in its intimacy.