David Kordansky Gallery is happy to current Valuable Moments, an exhibition of latest work, sculpture, and movies by Sayre Gomez. On view via March 1, 2026, Valuable Moments is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and can span all three areas at its Los Angeles location.
Sayre Gomez has develop into acknowledged as one in every of modern artwork’s keenest observers of American city life. His newest exhibition of large-scale photorealistic work, meticulously realized sculptures, and new explorations into video and wall portray reveal an evolving, deeply thought of engagement with the sprawling panorama of Los Angeles. His work is important, romantic, exact, doubting, and hopeful—questioning authenticity, reminiscence, and the way we see and interpret historical past within the current tense. Valuable Moments extends this inquiry into extra private territory, contemplating how the artist’s youngsters encounter an atmosphere saturated with the visible language of late capitalism, and the way these encounters form his personal understanding. Presenting the fullest expression of Gomez’s imaginative and prescient so far, the exhibition brings collectively themes the artist has explored all through his observe: the fetishization of youth and nostalgia as a response to mortality, the communication techniques—each macro and micro—that outline modern life, and the methods our constructed atmosphere supplies clues as to what we worth as people and as a society.
Gomez’s work depict Los Angeles via composite photographs, combining what he calls a “documentary impulse” with subtle formal development. Discovered imagery, mobile phone photographs, and inventory images are merged utilizing methods he has honed over years—an amalgamation of business photograph retouching, Hollywood set portray, handbook signal portray traditions, and digital instruments—revealing a extremely delicate thoughts attuned to the codes by which civilization each reveals and obscures its intentions. His use of analog instruments of copy embraces technical precision, connecting not solely to notions of craft and labor but in addition to the empirical truth-seeking inherent within the histories of portray and images. Fairly than straight depicting socio-political buildings of inequity and dysfunction, Gomez’s work attracts on imagery that exists as reflections of what these techniques produce: the simply interchangeable grid of strip mall signage, the technological layering of communication infrastructure, and the billboard as spectacle looming over the panorama.
The portray Vertigo (2025) makes manifest the collision of spectacle and decay attribute of Gomez’s work. A colossal commercial for the fast-fashion model Vogue Nova perched atop a landmark Artwork Deco constructing in downtown Los Angeles is foregrounded by a automobile seemingly functioning as somebody’s dwelling. The billboard depicts a mannequin airbrushed to perfection, clad in a fifteen-dollar bodycon costume promising on the spot glamour above a metropolis the place housing has more and more develop into an unaffordable luxurious. The portray in its totality turns into an emblem of the dichotomies implicit in his work. Stark inequality, widespread voyeuristic publicity, and a hierarchy of visibility, all rendered in magic hour mild, function as a cognitive mapping of late America as seen via the cultural and financial specificity of Southern California.
Gomez’s sculptures concentrate on singular architectural kinds that may very well be a protagonist drawn straight from one in every of his work. These three-dimensional works translate visually advanced, monumental buildings into diminished scales that enable them to occupy an intimate spatial relationship with the viewer. In works corresponding to Totem 4 (2024), a scaled duplicate of a utility pole gathers a number of generations of communication expertise, whereas handmade flyers and commercials anchor the work inside a selected second in time. Rendered with exacting precision, these once-overlooked buildings are elevated into objects that invite reverence and sustained contemplation. Annelid (2025), a caterpillar-shaped playground tunnel, together with the Valuable Moments–impressed doll figures put in within the gallery rafters, equally repurpose acquainted objects and childhood imagery to discover nostalgia, innocence, and the social techniques that form on a regular basis life. By miniaturizing these huge symbols, Gomez makes them newly seen—not as a gesture of mastery or possession, however as a way of nearer wanting.
The exhibition culminates with Oceanwide Plaza (2025–2026), the artist’s most formidable and sophisticated sculpture so far. A scale recreation of the unfinished mixed-use improvement that has develop into one in every of LA’s most seen landmarks, the work examines how a single construction can embody the cascading failures of worldwide capitalism, municipal governance, and speculative actual property. The Oceanwide Plaza towers—deserted in 2019 when their Chinese language buyers ran out of funds—had been taken over in 2024 by graffiti artists who climbed the buildings, protecting their facades in tags and murals seen from the freeway. What started as a logo of transnational capital’s ambitions turned a monument to its collapse, after which a web site of unauthorized inventive reclamation. Gomez’s duplicate captures this layered historical past, rendering each the architectural skeleton and its accumulation of illicit markings with painstaking precision. The sculpture distills Gomez’s broader undertaking of creating seen the contradictions embedded within the constructed atmosphere, the place company aspiration, systemic breakdown, and grassroots expression occupy the identical contested house.
Valuable Moments resists straightforward cynicism or didacticism. Gomez approaches his topics via what he describes as “a humanist lens on a macro scale,” attentive to the truth that the techniques wherein we reside are formed by individuals who, in flip, reside with their long-term penalties. His works steadiness critique with care, acknowledging “the smoldering ruins simply outdoors the body” whereas rendering probably the most acquainted environments with sustained formal and aesthetic consideration. By work that hint the layered histories of the city panorama and sculptures that carry missed buildings into focus, the exhibition provides a sustained meditation on how time is marked, that means is produced, and the circumstances of up to date American life are understood, formed by an ongoing effort to think about each the world that shaped the artist and the one he now inhabits.
