Sasha Gordon’s paintings feel familiar until they do not. A face might initially read as a portrait, a bedroom as an ordinary interior, a body as something completely human. Then the proportions begin to shift. Skin turns blue, green or almost translucent. Eyes grow too large. Limbs bend into positions that feel slightly impossible. Multiple versions of the same woman appear together, touching, watching or confronting one another. What starts as realism slowly gives way to something psychological, surreal and deeply personal.
Gordon was born in 1998 and grew up in Somers, New York, a small town in Westchester County. Her mother was born in Seoul and immigrated to the United States, while her father is Polish American and Jewish. Growing up biracial in a largely white environment made Gordon intensely aware of appearance from an early age. She has spoken about feeling different from the people around her and about struggling to find images of Asian women who looked like her or her mother in the culture she consumed.
Art entered her life almost immediately. Gordon was constantly drawing as a child, enough that her mother eventually created a dedicated space for her to work and enrolled her in classes. She began learning oil painting while still in elementary school. Her earliest education was traditional. She copied paintings, studied artists such as Van Gogh, Monet and Georgia O’Keeffe and developed technical ability long before she began questioning what her own paintings were supposed to say.
Fashion existed beside painting from the beginning. Gordon learned to sew and crochet and at one point imagined herself designing clothes. Her mother’s taste left an impression as well. She remembers the vintage coats and unusual silhouettes her mother wore around their suburban town, clothes Gordon once found embarrassing because they made her mother stand apart from everyone else. Years later, that sense of dressing differently, occupying space differently and being visibly unlike the people around you would return inside Gordon’s work.
She entered the Rhode Island School of Design to study painting, and RISD became the point where technical skill began turning into a language of her own. Before college, Gordon frequently painted classmates and people around her. At RISD she found herself surrounded by a more diverse group of artists and began questioning why she had spent so much time looking outward.
She started painting herself.
The decision opened everything up. Gordon could use her own body to work through race, beauty, sexuality, weight, embarrassment, desire and the complicated experience of seeing yourself through other people’s expectations. The figures were recognizable as Gordon, but they were never meant to remain simple self portraits. She began exaggerating herself, multiplying herself and eventually separating the painted Sasha from the real one.
While she was still a student, her work began circulating beyond school. Collector Jonathan Travis discovered Gordon through Instagram and bought several paintings before introducing her to Los Angeles dealer Matthew Brown. Brown eventually visited Gordon’s family home in New York, where years of her paintings covered the walls. By the end of 2019, while Gordon was still at RISD, her work appeared in Brown’s Los Angeles exhibition Nostos.
She was barely into her twenties.
One of the paintings in that exhibition was Gone Fishing, completed in 2019. At the time, it existed inside the earliest stage of Gordon’s professional career. Five years later, the same painting sold at Christie’s for $214,200, becoming a clear measure of how quickly the art world had begun paying attention.
Gordon graduated from RISD in 2020, just as the pandemic disrupted the traditional beginning of a young artist’s career. She returned home and continued working. The isolation pushed her paintings even further inward. Rather than documenting the world around her, Gordon began constructing environments based on memory, emotion and imagination.
Her first solo exhibition with Matthew Brown, Enters Thief, opened in Los Angeles in 2021. The paintings dealt with dysmorphia, racial identity and Gordon’s experience growing up in a larger East Asian body, but they avoided straightforward autobiography. Gordon rebuilt memories rather than illustrating them. Bodies floated inside strange rooms. Color appeared beneath skin. Faces remained obsessively rendered while their surroundings drifted into something closer to dreams.
The visual language that now defines her work became clearer. Gordon’s figures developed large, watchful eyes. Skin appeared illuminated from within. Perspective became unstable. Different versions of Gordon began existing inside the same image.
By then, Gordon was no longer simply painting herself. She was creating characters from herself.
That idea expanded in Hands of Others, her 2022 exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch in New York. The paintings introduced multiple Gordon doppelgängers living inside surreal environments where hands, gestures and unseen forces suggested control and observation. Some figures looked vulnerable while others appeared powerful, confrontational or detached. They could function like different personalities occupying a single consciousness.
Fashion remained part of the imagery. Gordon pulled from memories, pop culture and the clothes she had grown up around. Costumes could establish a character before anything else in the painting did. The work increasingly felt less like portraiture and more like scenes from a world with its own rules.
Her 2023 exhibition The Flesh Disappears, But Continues to Ache at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London pushed the body further away from reality. Gordon began transforming herself into animals, plants and geological forms. The human body became something temporary, something that could mutate when ordinary human experience became too difficult or restrictive.
It was a natural extension of everything she had already been doing. First she painted herself. Then she divided herself. Eventually she allowed herself to become something else entirely.
Later that year, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami opened Sasha Gordon: Surrogate Self, Gordon’s first solo museum exhibition. She was only 25. The paintings continued examining transformation, alienation, intimacy and embodiment, positioning Gordon’s body not simply as a subject but as an avatar capable of carrying different identities and emotional states.
Museums moved quickly. Her work entered collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, ICA Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and others.
By 2024, the gallery world followed.
David Zwirner announced that it would represent Gordon jointly with Matthew Brown after Zwirner encountered her work at ICA Miami. Rather than leaving the gallery that had supported her before graduation, Gordon entered a shared representation structure that connected Brown’s early relationship with the international reach of one of contemporary art’s largest galleries.
At 26, Gordon had gone from an art student posting work online to an artist represented by David Zwirner in roughly five years.
Her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Haze, opened in New York in 2025. By then Gordon’s paintings had developed into something closer to a continuous fictional universe. Behind the scenes, she has referred to that universe as “SashaWorld.”
The name makes sense.
Her paintings now operate like fragments from a mythology she is slowly constructing. The figures resemble Gordon, but they do not have to behave like her. They smoke, stare, transform, fight, dissociate, pose and exist inside situations that can feel funny, uncomfortable or frightening. In one painting Gordon quietly clips her toenails while an enormous explosion unfolds behind her. In another she presents her body without attempting to idealize it.
The tension is essential.
Gordon’s work is sometimes described through representation or body positivity, but those ideas only explain part of what she is doing. She is interested in the body precisely because it is unstable. It can be desired and hated at the same time. It can feel powerful one moment and alien the next. It can belong to you while somehow feeling separate from you.
Her technique reinforces that instability. Gordon builds paintings through thin layers of oil, allowing blues, greens, yellows and reds to remain visible beneath the surface of the skin. The figures can look digitally altered even though the paintings are constructed slowly by hand. The realism makes the impossible parts believable.
One detail has remained remarkably consistent since childhood.
Gordon begins faces with the eyes.
She drew that way as a child and continues to build faces outward from them. It is fitting for paintings so concerned with looking, being looked at and understanding yourself through the gaze of someone else. Gordon’s figures constantly seem aware of observation. Sometimes they stare directly at the viewer. Sometimes they watch one another. Often they seem to be watching themselves.
That may be the clearest way to understand Gordon’s entire career so far.
She began as a technically gifted child learning how to reproduce images that already existed. She became a student painting the people around her. Then she turned the image toward herself. From there, the self split apart, multiplied, transformed and eventually became the population of an entire fictional world.
The person who once struggled to see herself inside the images surrounding her ultimately stopped waiting for those images to appear.
She built her own.
