Tajh Rust's fictional portraits map the reciprocal relationship between subject and setting
Tajh Rust, Rückenfigur III, 2025. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 in. (182.9 x 152.4 cm.).
NEW YORK, NY.—
Alexander Berggruen is presenting Tajh Rust: How to Disappear. The gallery's first solo show with the artist, this exhibition opened Thursday, March 5, 2026.
Tajh Rust’s paintings depict primarily Black fictional figures in leisurely settings, with particular attention to storytelling, pattern, and environment. Rooted in questions of representation, Rust explores varied painterly ways to rendering figures and their environments. Through this inquiry, he points to the reciprocal effects between subject and environment. Across silvered glass and paintings on canvas, How to Disappear reflects a meditative stance on finding unity with one’s environment.
The exhibition takes as its starting point the painting Rückenfigur III. The work collapses the art historical concept of the Rückenfigur—most closely associated with Casper David Friedrich—with a scene of a fisherman Rust witnessed during his Black Rock residency in Senegal. In Rust’s rendition, the horizontal line where the figure’s shirt meets his shorts aligns with the horizon of the sea. The figure merges with the seascape as his blue clothing mimics the textures and colors of the sea and sky.
Throughout How to Disappear, the colors and patterns of the environment are echoed in the figures’ attire. For instance, in the nocturne Once in a Blue, a swimming pool is rendered with confident, wide brushstrokes that capture light skimming across the water. The foremost figure wears swim trunks that depict water differently: here, it appears as undulating blue lines across a field of white. The chain-link fence surrounding the pool recalls a pixelated image. Rust repeats and emphasizes this grid-like pattern in Meshes: the patchwork of the rope hammock is reflected literally in the watery ground below and metaphorically in the crocheted garments worn by the two figures. Meanwhile, in the silvered glass works, the line quality used to render the figures echoes the rippling lines that depict water.
The silvered glass works employ mirrored surfaces to depict figures floating in water. Each viewer’s experience inherently reflects their own image, implicating them in the act of disappearance—of both the painted subject and themselves. Reflecting the paintings on canvas hung alongside them, the mirrored works further obscure the figures presented elsewhere in the exhibition.
Like painters Hernan Bas and Toyin Ojih Odutola, Rust creates figures between reality and fiction. Though the figures in this exhibition are drawn almost entirely from the artist’s imagination, their gestures and expressions convey authentic-feeling relationships with one another and with their environments. The exhibition charts a range of experiences, from solitary meditative moments in nature to a family with a young child on a beach to a party scene inside the chain-link fence of a backyard. Across these encounters, the central figures’ expressions remain peaceful.
Through fictional portraiture, Rust paints visually poetic scenes that encourage recognition of the fluid nature of identity, particularly in relation to the environment.
by Kirsten Cave, adapted from the artist’s statement.
Tajh Rust (b. 1989, Brooklyn, NY) received an MFA from Yale University, School of Art and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY. Rust’s work has been shown at Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Harvey B. Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC; Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, FL; Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT; and Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn, NY, among others. His work is included in the public collections of Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, The Bunker Artspace, Miami, FL; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL. He was an artist in residence at Silver Art Projects, New York, NY and a recipient of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, among other accolades. The artist lives and works in New York.
