NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian announced 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.
Douglas has long experimented with the ideas of appropriation and doubling that shape GHOSTS. 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, the fact that “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.
Eliza Douglas was born in 1984 in New York and lives and works in New York. Exhibitions include 6 1/2 Weeks: My Gleaming Soul, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2017); Old Tissues Filled with Tears, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2017–18); and Jewish Museum, New York (2018). Group exhibitions include Anne Imhof: Sex, Tate Modern, London, and Castello di Rivoli, Italy (2019–21); My Cartography: The Erling Kagge Collection, Foundation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, France (2020–21); Nature Mortes: “Carte Blanche” to Anne Imhof, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021); Anne Imhof: Youth, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2022); In First Person Plural, MACRO–Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome (2023); Death and the Devil, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany (2023); KAWS. ART & COMIX, Albertina Modern, Vienna (2026); and Body Fragment, Power Station, Dallas (2026).
