Post-Paintings, Pyrex Bowls, and Dollar-Store Flowers: Our Critic's Guide to Art on the UES Right Now

Eliza Douglas’s New York solo debut “Ghosts” at Gagosian presents eight acid-colored compositions built through archaeological layering of earlier works. The paintings incorporate UV-printed spectral imagery of her aunt, Leslie Kean, described as a UFO journalist, overlaid atop the canvases. In some works, Kean’s face appears like an apparition, while in others it coexists with anime line drawings such as Sailor Moon. Douglas reworks earlier Pop-Art-influenced versions with changed titles while retaining structural elements like undulating fabric distortions from a “T-shirt” series and a recurring green monster figure. The works function as post-painting images showing cultural echo chambers and personal visual associations, including appropriated selfies.

"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 Städelsschule 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"

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