With A Burnt Child Loves the Fire the visual artist Dora Jeridi (Paris, 1988) launches her first collaboration with New York’s Boesky Gallery. From September 10 to October 17, 2026, her large canvases take us on a journey through fabrics and drapery, rendered with the illusion of the most dazzling painting.
Jeridi’s universe has revolved for years around the allure of fabric, with its countless folds and the play of light running through it, whether on a body or inside the furnishings of an opulent room.
Born and raised in Paris, Dora Jeridi often brings into her paintings the memory of her grandparents’ living room. That typically Parisian décor, made of endless fabrics and rich drapes, seems to flow beneath her choice to make art, which in painting celebrates the play and beauty of drapery.
The history of art, ever since the workshops of the fifteenth century, has always had a close bond with the study of the most elegant fabrics. From the brocade of noble portraits to the velvet of the finest garments, painting and portraiture have always aimed to render a leading material with precision, as a symbol of status. Jeridi, who moved to New York for an artist residency, has combined the memory of Parisian homes and fabrics with a surprising discovery, found in the New York archives of Galliano’s collections for Dior.
The paintings in the solo show A Burnt Child Loves the Fire thus embrace a double soul, that of the intimate memory of personal, lived-in spaces and that of the stylized figures and silhouettes, unearthed in the decorations of these haute couture fabrics.
The title of the exhibition nods to a 14th-century proverb, also cited by Oscar Wilde, and flips it in its own way, turning “a burnt child dreads the fire” on its head. It is the childlike curiosity that has always pushed Jeridi to explore the domestic space as a ground of constant discovery, often inhabited by imagination and fantasy. So, in the large paintings on view at Boesky Gallery, the dark presence of an oily, black matter blends with flashes of fabric and drapery, which meet dreamed-up worlds and archetypal forms of fairy-tale, bewitched or otherworldly universes.
As the press release, which reports the artist’s words, puts it, what emerges is “a fiery Odyssey of self-discovery amid a circumscribed story”.
