Eliza Douglas
Gagosian | 821 Park Avenue
Through July 31, 2026
Gallery hopping on the Upper East Side this month should begin with Eliza Douglas’s New York solo debut, “Ghosts,” at Gagosian’s Park and 75th outpost. The confounding compositions in acid colors are archeologically layered. The New York-born and German-trained artist (at the Städelschule in Frankfurt) has quite literally painted—or printed—over works previously shown at the recently shuttered French gallery Air de Paris gallery (RIP). And who is this diaphanous bespectacled lady emerging from each of the eight canvases?
As I parsed the layers, I thought of how the choreography of Merce Cunningham maintained a largely autonomous relationship to the musical score giving his pieces a jolting complexity. A similar effect is achieved here, with the UV-printed spectral visage of Douglas’s aunt—Leslie Kean, who’s described as a UFO journalist—overlayed atop the paintings. In one, her face emerges like an apparition in a sort of mushroom cloud; in another, she coexists, enmeshed, with an anime line-drawing of Sailor Moon.
You can see for yourself how Douglas has radically reworked these paintings by comparing them to their more explicitly Pop-Art-influenced previous incarnations, with different titles, as seen on Air de Paris’s website. Structural elements remain, like the distorting effects of undulating fabric from the paintings originally in the artist’s “T-shirt” series as well as the green monster figure that recurs in her “I Am the Horse you Should Bet On” works.
Douglas makes distinctly post-painting paintings that represent the complex life cycle of contemporary images. She makes visible the echo chambers of cultural signs and symbols alongside more personal, even private, visual associations, as in her appropriation of her aunt’s selfies, while utilizing an array of painterly tactics—even labor arrangements. (The artist’s gestural mark making may appear atop a painting that Douglas has farmed out to another artist, or even a painting mill in China, to produce.)
Douglas may be best known for work in other, related, fields, particularly as muse to and collaborator with both Demna, as a model when the designer was at Balenciaga, and the performance artist Anne Imhof. Demna even saw fit to clone—digitally, at least—Douglas so that she could walk every look in the fashion house’s Spring 2022 season launch video.
I almost resent the obligation I feel to relay this biographically contextualizing information, out of fear that it distracts from just looking at the paintings, which I loved. Here, Douglas is an artist wholly in command of her medium.
Marcel Duchamp
Gagosian | 980 Madison Avenue
Through June 27, 2026
Robert Rauschenberg: Important Early Works from the Cy Twombly Foundation
Gagosian | 980 Madison Avenue
Through July 31, 2026
Before heading further Uptown, stop in to see the Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg shows at the Gagosian UES flagship (980 Madison Avenue). The Duchamp works on view provide a tidy summation, repeating many of the highlights of the exhaustive deep dive now on view at MoMA and making my point once more that his oeuvre, when meticulously represented, is “rife with replicas,” seen also in the repetitions between institutions. (You’ll find a stool-mounted bicycle wheel, yet another readymade snow shovel, and a couple of defaced Mona Lisas here too.) The Rauschenberg show highlights early work—a Joseph Cornell-like box construction and earthy sculptures that recall Cy Twombly’s foray into the medium.
David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis
White Cube | 1002 Madison Avenue
Through June 13, 2026
One block north, at White Cube, you’ll find a stimulating pairing of the American David Hammons with the late Greek-Italian artist Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017). It’s their first two-person exhibition since they became friends and exhibited together in the early 1990s at the American Academy in Rome.
It’s a revelatory pairing that highlights the great affinity that Hammons’s work shares with Arte Povera, the Italian art movement of the late 1960s that used common, humble, non-fine art materials. Think of the iconic photo of snowballs lined up on a blanket, taken by Dawoud Bey, of Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale performance from 1983. That work is represented here, with a framed inkjet-printed text and a Pyrex bowl full of water, as Untitled (Snowball), 1983/2003. It greets you, like a vessel of holy water in a Catholic church when the elevator doors open to the second floor.
There are 40 works in the show, split between the two artists across two floors. Kounellis’s visual poems on paper and jute bags full of coal (Untitled, 1968) enter into a dialogue with great examples of Hammons’s tarp covered paintings and body prints, as well as his surreal applications of Black hair clippings on rocks and a couch. Here also is Hammons’s In the Hood, 1993—a cut-off, dark sweatshirt hood, more deep green than black, attached high on the wall and held partly open, like a monk’s hood, with a loop of wire. It most famously illustrates Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, her 2014, book-length poem. When are we going to get the major institutional Hammons retrospective we all need and deserve? Don’t miss this show, while we wait.
Nobuyoshi Araki and Roe Ethridge
Anton Kern Gallery | 16 East 55th Street
Through July 2, 2026
You might want to get a cab or a train to head the 22 blocks south to Anton Kern. I took a detour, walking most of the 30 minutes through Central Park, arriving refreshed to see another illuminating pairing: the photographers Roe Ethridge and Nobuyoshi Araki.
Ethridge serves up visual confections several ways here, flexing his command of the medium. The pinhole-camera soft-focus of his “Floral Arrangements,” flowers photographed in dollar store vases against printed backdrops (which Ethridge has altered with paint) appear dreamy, imagined rather than recorded, especially in comparison to Araki’s “Flower Cemetery” series from 2017, which stages flower bouquets alongside plastic figurines that read more directly as documents of play and performance with objects.
Seven of Araki’s black-and-white diptychs from his Tokyo Nude series, 1989, juxtapose female nudes with a photo of urban or domestic tableaus. In one, a beat-up traffic cone visually echoes the triangle of a standing woman’s black underwear.
Ethridge’s richly saturated composition Egyptian Funerary Mask and Me, 2025, uses mirrors to multiply its central subject, while mischievously allowing the photographer to sneak into the picture, giving it a sense of eternal becoming. It’s the exhibition’s show-stopping stunner.
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