Gagosian opened GHOSTS, Eliza Douglas’s first solo exhibition in New York and her debut exhibition with the gallery. Now open at the Park & 75 location, the presentation is the first in a new series of solo exhibitions curated by Francesco Bonami.
Douglas’s paintings have often operated as what have been described as “meta-paintings”, works acutely aware of their own status and histories. Drawing from advertising, popular culture and abstraction, her practice continually probes ideas around originality, authorship and the circulation of images. Working across performance, fashion, photography and sculpture alongside painting, Douglas frequently tests the boundaries between authenticity and repetition.
For GHOSTS, the artist turns that process back onto her own work. The exhibition reworks paintings originally shown over the last decade at Air de Paris, layering them with photographs taken by her aunt, journalist Leslie Kean, whose reporting has long focused on UFOs and unexplained phenomena.
Beginning in 2025, Kean started making selfies that she believed captured strange visual occurrences. Douglas manipulates and UV-prints these images before superimposing them onto earlier paintings, partially obscuring and transforming them. The result is a body of work where images appear suspended between revelation and concealment, memory and reappearance.
The exhibition also echoes ideas explored in Haunted Realism, Gagosian London’s 2022 exhibition investigating hauntology — a term associated with philosopher Jacques Derrida that describes the persistence of the past within the present.
© Eliza Douglas, Photo: Owen Conway Courtesy Gagosian
Appropriation and doubling have long occupied Douglas’s practice. Previous projects have borrowed titles from artists, institutions and exhibitions, including Josh Smith, THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL and Gagosian itself. In GHOSTS, however, Douglas turns this logic inward, recycling and consuming her own existing work to create something new.
The exhibition includes a black-and-white photograph of Florence Bonnefous, founder of Air de Paris, extending the exhibition’s wider reflections on memory, repetition and artistic lineage.
As curator Francesco Bonami notes of the Park & 75 programme:
“The unique and historic character of the Park & 75 location is an ideal space for a laboratory of fresh perspectives that will complement the gallery’s existing programming.”
ELIZA DOUGLAS, GHOSTS, May 12th–July 31st, 2026 Gagosian, Park & 75
About the artist
Eliza Douglas was born in 1984 in New York and lives and works in New York. Exhibitions include 6 1/2 Weeks: My Gleaming Soul, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2017); Old Tissues Filled with Tears, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2017–18); and Jewish Museum, New York (2018). Group exhibitions include Anne Imhof: Sex, Tate Modern, London, and Castello di Rivoli, Italy (2019–21); My Cartography: The Erling Kagge Collection, Foundation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, France (2020– 21); Nature Mortes: “Carte Blanche” to Anne Imhof, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021); Anne Imhof: Youth, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2022); In First Person Plural, MACRO–Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome (2023); Death and the Devil, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany (2023); KAWS. ART & COMIX, Albertina Modern, Vienna (2026); and Body Fragment, Power Station, Dallas (2026)
