Sasha Gordon

Sasha Gordon (born 1998) is an American figurative painter. Her self-portraits, executed with oil paints, typically depict her nude body in a variety of strange situations. Her work grapples with misogyny, racism, and homophobia. Vogue described Gordon's paintings as having a “secret alchemy that sets them off from the current avalanche of figurative art rooted in identity politics".

Biography
Sasha Gordon was born in 1998 to a Polish American Jewish father and a Korean mother. She grew up in Somers, New York and expressed interest in art at an early age. When she was four, she was encouraged by her mother who set up a table with crayons, colored pencils, and paper. At five, she began taking classes at a local art center. At ten, a local newspaper published a photo of Gordon painting an accurate full-scale replica of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night. During these early years, she spent hours after school painting rather than doing her homework.

Gordon entered the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2016. There she soon experimented with hyperrealistic paintings of the human face. During her sophomore year, she began shifting towards painting self-portraits that explored the complexities of her identity. This caught the attention of gallerist Matthew Brown, who included one of Gordon's paintings in a group show at his LA gallery in 2019 while she was still at RISD, and the following year gave Gordon her first solo show, which drew favorable reviews from critics and led to her first museum acquisition by ICA Miami.

Over the following years, Gordon's career gained momentum, leading ArtNet to describe her early success as "head-spinning". In 2022, one of her large self-portraits was shown at the Rudolph Tegners Museum outside Copenhagen alongside older established artists like Cecily Brown and Jenna Gribbon. New American Paintings named Gordon's painting My Friend Will Be Me their #1 2022 "Painting We Just Can't Stop Thinking About". Gordon's profile in Cultured Magazine was one of the publication's ten "Most Read" stories in 2022.

In 2023, her painting Campfire was included in the Hammer Museum’s show Together in Time. Also that year, visitors to the Baltimore Museum of Art voted Gordon's painting Mood Ring as one of their top five "most loved" works in the museum. In December 2023, her first solo museum show opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, coinciding with Art Basel. ArtNet called the opening of the show "highly anticipated" and noted that Gordon is "among the most sought-after young artists". Gordon attended the 2023 Met Gala as a guest of Balenciaga, wearing an outfit designed for the occasion by Elena Velez.

In 2024, The New York Times called Gordon one of the "artists redefining portraits of the human body for a more inclusive age".

Gordon lives in Brooklyn, New York and works from her studio there.

Work
Gordon's work often revisits and rewrites memories of her childhood by inserting herself, often in multiples, to lay claim to the right to occupy space as a biracial, queer woman. She responds to the fetishization of the Asian female body by depicting empowering self-portraits of her (often nude) body. Her everyday scenes of joy and distress fill large canvases with vibrant, rich cool tones and exacting technical detail. Her figures' eyes often are unnaturally glossy, their skin soft and plasticky, illustrating the alienation and disconnection in a white, heteronormative space while also offering a surreal escape. In this way, art-making offers Gordon a therapeutic processing of vulnerable memories.

Of the nudity in her work, Gordon says

"Sometimes clothing can add too much context to the narrative and I want the characters to be freer from assumptions. They’re most vulnerable when they’re nude. So much body language can be shown through skin and the folds, and there’s a different type of movement that I’m interested in. And there’s obviously more intimacy in those scenes."

Art Basel's Stories publication said of Gordon's work ahead of her first museum solo show

"Contradicting painting traditions that positioned women as objects to be consumed, the female forms in these works are object and protagonist, subject and voyeur – unapologetic in their rage."

Influences
Gordon found it difficult to relate to many of the artists and artworks she was exposed to in her youth because the artists and their subject matter were white and therefore did not match her East Asian appearance. She discovered the work of Liu Wei, which empowered her and inspired her to make paintings of people that she connects with racially and emotionally. Other artists that Gordon cites as impacting her work are Kerry James Marshall, Nicole Eisenman, Dana Shutz, Lisa Yuskavage, Tetsuya Ishida, and Cheyenne Julien.

For some of her work, Gordon draws inspiration from renaissance painters such as Botticelli, Titian, and Caravaggio. She credits Jennifer Packer, one of her professors at RISD, with encouraging the study of renaissance painting.

Campfire, 2021
Oil and molding paste on canvas, 6 ×. In this painting, Gordon presents herself in many forms and a range of affective states. Its cool tones and rich blues are used to create a surreal and magical feeling. While some renditions of the artist frolic in the water, another proudly chops wood besides several smoking and drinking. The painting offered Gordon the ability to reflect and heal from her experiences "as a lesbian Asian girl growing up in a white, upper-middle-class New York suburb."

Concert Mistress, 2021
Oil on canvas, 72 ×. This large self-portrait shows Gordon grinning wildly while playing a violin, an unseen viewer peering through the window. Playing with the model minority stereotype, Gordon pushes viewers to question their biases and to address the pressures of the white gaze and the stereotypes it engenders.

The Archer (diptych), 2021
Oil on canvas, 3 ×. These pieces face each other across a room – one self-portrait draws her arrow toward the opposing painting, where another resignedly and anxiously offers a thumbs up, apple on head and missed arrows at her feet. At war with herself and "catching viewers in the crossfire," Gordon implicates those gazing upon her body.

I Left the Night the Dummy Crashed the Gordon’s Volvo, 2017
Oil on canvas, 5 ×. This work is one of the most pronounced of a series that Gordon executed in 2017 as she transitioned from her early hyperrealistic work to her signature works featuring her body. This series of transitional works showed Gordon as a latex dummy. Asked about this painting in a 2018 interview, Gordon stated:

"In my recent work, I have this figure, sometimes multiple, in a black, latex, plastic suit that represents my anxiety and depression, personifying it. A large part of my anxiety is my fear of death...In this piece, I am faking my death, to escape reality."

Public collections

 * Almost a Very Rare Thing (2022), Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, California
 * Mood Ring (2022) Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
 * Campfire (2021), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California
 * Mirror (2021), The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, Texas
 * Concert Mistress (2021), ICA Miami, Miami, Florida