A Haunting: For Gagosian Debut, Eliza Douglas Recycles Unsold Paintings, Channels the Paranormal

When the curator Francesco Bonami messaged Eliza Douglas on Instagram to invite her to exhibit at Gagosian, she left him on read.

“I didn’t reply because I didn’t think it could be real as it was such an untraditional way to be invited by such an esteemed establishment,” Douglas told me. Fortunately, Bonami persisted, the two eventually met, and she was “thrilled to accept.”

Staged at the gallery’s small and rather quirky Park and 75 location on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Douglas’s “GHOSTS” is the first in an open-ended exhibition series that Bonami is curating in the space with artists not represented by Gagosian.

Douglas has become a fixture in the city in recent years—walking the runway for Balenciaga, helping her former partner Anne Imhof stage a spectacle at the Park Avenue Armory, exhibiting two paintings in the Jewish Museum‘s lobby—but this is actually the fourth-generation New Yorker’s first solo show in her hometown.

Douglas had reason to be suspicious of Bonami’s invitation: She had previously produced a hoax involving Gagosian’s name. At the 2022 edition of the Armory Show, where she was showing with the Los Angeles gallery Overduin and Co., she swapped the gallery’s booth sign for a replica of Gagosian’s. The presentation “stimulated gossip and confusion,” she said in an email interview. “Some people assumed I was newly represented by Gagosian, even though it was a comically small booth in a row of young galleries.”

No hard feelings, apparently. For her real Gagosian debut, she has made a series of beguiling and multi-layered works that mischievously address the art system.

‘Meta-Paintings’ and the Paranormal

Douglas’s paintings often appear to be strangely conscious of their own place in time. Containing commercial imagery, art-historical references, and fashion motifs, they remind viewers that they are a category of consumer goods, no different from a handbag or an SUV, and they put ideas around authenticity and originality under intense pressure. (They’re typically described as “meta-paintings” by her galleries.)

In “GHOSTS,” Douglas has taken a characteristically self-referential approach, incorporating into her paintings otherworldly selfies by Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist specializing in UFOs and the afterlife who is also the artist’s aunt. Kean’s face is blurred, distorted, and in certain instances, doubled; from a distance, parts of the images read like holes being burned through the canvas, or light leaks. Up close, they suggest glitching pixels.

Merging and overlapping mediums while smashing together references, these hard-to-pin-down paintings radiate a manic intensity—one that mirrors a cultural moment that is drowning in A.I.-generated content, deepfakes, and a general image overload.

A snarling cartoon image of Marvel’s Hulk gazes out from behind one of the clearer renderings of Kean, but both appear at risk of disintegrating in a flurry of ultra bright light. A comic-style onomatopoeic text sits beneath thin pigment in one place, while in another it is crystal clear, hovering above Kean’s head.

It’s tricky to parse out the layers of these paintings. Even standing in front of them, you may experience the half-absorbed, half-distracted feeling you get as cellphone and computer screens, subway and taxi ads, billboards and television sets compete for your attention.

What’s Old Is New Again

Douglas’s main gallery for the past decade, Air de Paris, closed on the exact May day the Gagosian show opened. “This synchronicity was the catalyst for my show,” she told me. “It felt symbolically potent, given how difficult it is for smaller galleries to survive in this moment, in contrast to a billion-dollar enterprise like Gagosian.”

In a stroke of ingenuity, Douglas made the works in “GHOSTS” by altering pieces that were sitting in Air de Paris’s inventory, dating from across the artist’s decade-long relationship with the gallery.

“I liked the idea of exposing something that is traditionally kept hidden,” Douglas said. “Galleries—especially an ultra-commercial one like Gagosian—typically obscure the existence of unsold works. There was something haunting about the act of recycling the paintings and presenting them anew.”

All but one of the paintings already had a layer of acrylic gel medium that gives them a subtle texture that only reveals itself up close and from certain angles. Douglas’s primary addition to these old canvases was the U.V.-printed images, which is how she incorporated her aunt’s selfies.

“I chose U.V. because it is especially good for printing on surfaces that aren’t flat,” she said. “It wasn’t possible to predict exactly how the print would look over the actual painting, which made the process exciting.”

Meeting the Moment 

Bonami’s relaxed and informal approach to the Park and 75 exhibition series is markedly different from how Gagosian usually operates. He will do several more shows, but the exact number is yet to be decided, and he’s only confirmed one more artist beyond Douglas, who’s not yet been announced.

The veteran curator (who once described his 2003 Venice Biennale as “a marvelous disaster”) has his own history with Gagosian. Last year, he curated its booth at Art Basel; in 2024 he organized a solo show for his friend Maurizio Cattelan at one of its Chelsea spaces; and in 2022 he put together a major group show at its Beverly Hills location.

The present exhibition series came out of conversations between Larry Gagosian, Millicent Wilner, a senior director there, and Bonami, who suggested showing young artists not affiliated with the gallery. (Young relatively speaking: He turned 70 last year, and Douglas is 41.)

Why did Bonami pick Douglas to start his series? On a video call from Milan, he said that he came across one of her works at a benefit auction for the Swiss Institute, where he is a board member. After the Instagram DM confusion, they finally met for a coffee, and when she described her idea—UFOs, and U.V. printing, and all—he thought “the idea was very weird,” he said.

He’s pleased with the outcome. “It’s very brave, and the result is quite astounding for me,” Bonami said. He senses “this kind of transparency that really goes behind the idea of painting, this idea to erase the painting and keep the memory. It’s a sort of pre-Alzheimer’s condition, where there are these layers of memory that go all over.”

Without quite getting nostalgic, Bonami said that curating in Gagosian’s 1,000-square-foot gallery space has brought him back, just a bit, to a time in the art world when things were more improvised and less structured. It’s a refreshing sensibility, since so much in the art industry now feels highly polished, excessively marketed, and carefully orchestrated.

Douglas’s paintings, for their part, elude easy readings and touch on the absurd, while inviting multiple perspectives, both visually and thematically. These are commitments that we could use more of today.

“I hope that this show allows for productive confusion, which adds to the never-ending reinvention of painting,” Douglas said. “Due to the many layers and processes involved in their creation, they cannot be digested at one glance. The scale is such that the image changes depending on where you stand. It moves between abstraction and figuration in hopefully refreshing ways.”

Debates about the evolution and nature of painting have quieted in recent decades (more from exhaustion than resolution), but Douglas’s paintings seem to offer a fresh way back into those conversations. Commingling documentary images, comics, portraiture, gestural brushstrokes, and text, they are at once familiar and foreign, radiating a deep seriousness as well as an aura of irreverence.

“Today, you see so many paintings, so many figurative paintings, so much illustration,” Bonami said. “These are not illustrations.” He riffed on the idea for a bit, and then made the point in slightly different terms. “This is autonomous,” he said. “These are really paintings. Either you like it or not.”