Sasha Gordon Finds Beauty and Empathy in the Shadows of the Human Mind
Sasha Gordon is one of the most compelling young talents to emerge from New York’s art scene—an artist who rose to fame during the pandemic boom yet managed to solidify her position with substantial institutional recognition before being picked up by a mega-gallery. First championed by rising L.A. dealer Matthew Brown, Gordon became last year’s youngest enfant prodige for David Zwirner, who in a twist of art-world serendipity, also happens to be Brown’s father-in-law. One could say things just stayed in the family, with a co-representation arrangement.
Chelsea had rarely seen such a line for a young artist as the one forming outside Zwirner’s 19th Street gallery for Gordon’s debut solo show, “Haze”—perhaps only rivaled by Salman Toor’s a few years earlier. Her new body of work, unveiled across the gallery’s entire space, confirmed the talent of an artist steadily advancing toward technical mastery. Gordon continues to balance this precision with an enigmatic, open-ended storytelling and a striking ability to probe the human psyche, reaching a level of empathic universality that only true masters achieve.
After the frenzy of that opening week, Observer caught up with Gordon to discuss how her style and technical command have evolved alongside a growing awareness of her own visual language. She explains that she wants her figures “to be timeless—figures that you could encounter across diverse narratives.” Her storytelling, she adds, “is born from a curiosity of the ambiguous,” and she wants each painting connected to this larger narrative “to have breathing room for questioning.”
While she continues to use the canvas as a stage for exploring identity, memory and cultural heritage through her Asian diasporic lens, Gordon clarifies that her characters aren’t strictly autobiographical. “I’ve been stepping away from making works explicitly about identity,” she says, noting that, for this reason, she also avoids embedding technology or clothing that might tie her figures to specific periods or settings. Still, Gordon acknowledges that she draws from her memories and daydreams, often returning to familiar landscapes such as those of upstate New York. These works contain emotional echoes she recognizes in herself—the darker recesses of the subconscious that surface through painting. After all, it’s impossible not to project fragments of one’s own self and shadow onto the canvas; it’s through that projection that we perceive and filter the world. “One day, I almost felt bad for one of the characters who was getting hazed and having her hair pulled. It fluctuates!” she admits.
What’s most striking, especially in person, is Gordon’s level of hyperrealism: the meticulous attention to even the smallest details that shape each composition. There is a palpable sense of planning and control behind such obsessive precision, yet this time-intensive process also becomes, for Gordon, a meditative exercise—a way to confront and process the abysses of the psyche and the shadows of the inner world. “Process-wise, I can definitely get obsessive, but I’m learning to let go,” she reflects, acknowledging that her rigorous hyperrealism stems from an extreme ambition she has no intention of suppressing. “I enjoy spending time envisioning my compositions and rendering elaborate detail.” For those who look closely, Gordon’s paintings reveal a deep pleasure in the act of painting itself—a fascination with the medium’s materiality and its boundless narrative potential.
In Pruning (2025), one of her most astonishingly detailed works, Gordon takes illusionism to new heights, rendering every crack and scratch of a metal-framed tank with meticulous precision. Inside it, a woman is held underwater by another figure, as if to suffocate and suppress the repressed—to keep that shadow projection submerged beneath the surface of consciousness.
In her works, Gordon moves further from traditional notions of beauty, embracing the grotesque to depict the raw, often uncomfortable dimensions of human experience—much like Francisco Goya once did. She notes that she has explored the register of fear more overtly in this series. “I kind of wanted to take my turn making a horror series. The emotional depth in horror feels so real,” she says, citing South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho’s The Host and its infamous nail-clipping scene as inspiration for It Was Still Far Away (2024). “Overall, I think these paintings have more brutality and violence to them than explicit horror.”
Gordon’s embrace of the grotesque recalls Roger Caillois’s writings on the aesthetics of horror—particularly his idea that the grotesque unsettles because it mirrors the instability of the self. Caillois described the grotesque and the monstrous as ruptures of form, where the boundaries between beauty and monstrosity collapse, creating a fascination that is both terrifying and seductive. In Gordon’s case, this dynamic animates figures caught between control and dissolution, empathy and cruelty—her painterly realism serving not as an escape but as an intensification of unease, compelling viewers to confront the meanings behind their discomfort. Echoing Georges Bataille, fear and fascination are inseparable, and the erotic and the violent share the same intensity of experience. In abjection, horror becomes a space for recognition.
Her older female characters, in particular, appear uncannily cruel and haunting—matriarchal figures who project a fierce, commanding presence rather than softness. They evoke archetypal women enforcing discipline with unshakable conviction. Their authority feels both nurturing and oppressive, reflecting a generational logic in which care and control are inseparable, as seen in Husbandry Heaven (2025). When Gordon began this series, she admits she found herself wondering: “Who are these doppelgangers? And where exactly are they? Where did they come from and why are they in this world?” Eventually, she realized she didn’t need to know. “Maybe they don’t have to be tethered to specificity. Maybe they’re aliens or some new humanoid creature crashing down to earth, and the main character just has no idea what she’s in for.”
At the same time, these figures suggest a lineage of women whose strength lies in persistence, vigilance and moral rigidity—qualities they view as essential for survival. Gordon’s women are rendered excessive, powerful and terrifying precisely because they refuse containment. Echoing Mary Russo’s The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, the grotesque female body here becomes a means to destabilize patriarchal norms and societal canons: in Gordon’s matriarchal figures, authority and monstrosity are two facets of the same survival instinct.
Gordon notes that the trio was also inspired by mythological archetypes such as the Fates, the Furies and the Graces, each representing different stages of life. “I gave them different personalities, which can be observed through various features like their postures, facial expressions and haircuts,” she says. Through these mythic echoes—and the archetype of the “negative mother”—Gordon confronts personal fears and traumas that surface in her process. Yet her turn toward the grotesque opens a deeper inquiry into the human condition, urging viewers to face discomfort and reconsider aesthetic and emotional boundaries. “My paintings come from my imagination, and the compositions in Haze consider psychological states more broadly.”
Indeed, the uncanny, disquieting atmosphere of these scenes transcends individual trauma to evoke collective anxieties—echoing the shared unease of our times. This is especially evident in Petrified (2025), an apocalyptic tableau envisioning a deserted, swamp-like landscape—a modern Waste Land of civilizational decay. Here, Gordon focuses on manipulating bodily flesh through varied textures and materials to convey psychological stress. “My characters oscillate between levels of consciousness – in between dissociating and feeling present,” suggesting that her scenes address universal conditions of fragility and psychic tension. “Sometimes I want them to feel heavy and grounded, and other times I want them to feel like they’re just melting away.”
Gordon embraces this visual ambiguity, expressing the idea that reality is never black or white but a continuous flux of emotions and contradictions—a mutable terrain shaped by perception. Her subjects multiply and fragment, echoing, cloning and reflecting the self. The figures in works like Pruning (2025) stage confrontations with internal multiplicity, using seemingly absurd scenarios to process deeper fears and repressed emotions—the “return of the repressed,” as Freud might put it. “My storytelling itself is born from a curiosity of the ambiguous,” Gordon reiterates. “I want each painting that’s connected to this larger narrative to have breathing room for questioning.”
That, ultimately, is the essence of Gordon’s work: a fearless, ongoing inquiry into human nature through painting—one that resonates with viewers’ own experiences and vulnerabilities, leaving space for reflection and empathy for the shared drama of existence in a flesh- and time-bound dimension.
More in Artists
