Until 31 July 2026, the Ghosts of Eliza Douglas (New York, 1984) are set to inhabit the spaces of the well-known New York gallery Gagosian Park&75. Curated by Francesco Bonami, the exhibition stages a present increasingly pervaded by AI, whose generative capacity seems boundless and oriented toward the imminent arrival of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).
In a fluid and almost illusory painting that flows like a carousel of images across a large screen, colour silhouettes intertwine with motifs, self-portraits and recurring traces that return and accumulate in layers. As with the Words series (2023) and the euphoric BANG!, the space of knowledge and a necessary introspection open onto a territory where the energy of colour weaves together a flow of intimate, shifting sensations that take shape in the gaze of whoever observes, explores and interprets.
Regarding the conceptual approach at work, the artist has noted: “I like the idea of making something that can’t easily be categorised as abstract or figurative, gestural or procedural. […] I want my work to be open and porous.“
From her collaboration with fashion house Balenciaga to the development of her current project for the New York space, Eliza Douglas entrusts to the possibility of art the euphoria of a mosaic of signs and presences capable of giving voice to the beauty of chaos. As the maker and mistress of a gestural and imaginative universe that finds itself in the sensation of material and colour, Douglas continuously gives birth to herself in the enigmatic and free quality of the most untamed of Bacchantes. As a tribute to the most urgent and precious sisterhood, the artist has returned to a series of photographs taken by her aunt Leslie Kean, a well-known investigative journalist who has long been documenting “otherworldly phenomena” and hypothetical UFO incursions on Earth. Immersed in the dense darkness of a sketched, starlit night, some of Kean’s shots are seasoned and fused with the inventiveness and gestural energy of the artist’s hand. Through a process of layering, UV prints are superimposed onto the living matter of painting. Retouching after retouching, through addition and subtraction, the presences brought into the gallery activate the circular, rotational motion of a visionary, all-consuming ouroboros — one that, for the present moment and the relentless pace of endless consumption, between the known and the unknown, can only return the semblance of a precarious body, inherently fragile and unacknowledged.
Article by Floriana Savino
