Eliza Douglas: GHOSTS

Gagosian is pleased to announce GHOSTS, an exhibition of new mixed-media paintings by Eliza Douglas, opening at Park & 75 in New York on May 12. The first in a series of solo presentations by different artists curated by Francesco Bonami, it is also Douglas’s first solo exhibition in New York and her first at the gallery. About the exhibition series, Bonami notes: “The unique and historic character of the Park & 75 location is an ideal space for a laboratory of fresh perspectives that will complement the gallery’s existing programming.” Douglas’s canvases have been characterized as “meta-paintings” that display an awareness of their own status and history. Often 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. Also working in performance, music, fashion, photography, and sculpture, Douglas interrogates originality and authenticity while testing material limits. In GHOSTS, Douglas reworks existing paintings that she exhibited over the past ten years at her French gallery, Air de Paris. She combines these compositions 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 the canvases on view at Park & 75, Douglas superimposes manipulated UV prints of these images onto her own paintings, partially veiling them. GHOSTS also contains echoes of Haunted Realism, a 2022 group exhibition at Gagosian London that explored the notion of hauntology—a term coined by Jacques Derrida that has come to denote a state of temporal overlap in recent culture in which the past is not dead but continues to haunt the present.