Thaddaeus Ropac has announced its representation of the American artist Jordan Casteel in collaboration with New York gallery Casey Kaplan. Casteel’s first solo show with Thaddaeus Ropac is slated to take place in April at its London location, followed by another exhibition at its Paris gallery next year. The artist was previously represented by MASSIMODECARLO, which she joined in 2021 until she stopped working with the gallery in 2022.
Casteel is known for her bold, expressive portraits of people of color, characterized by vibrant colors and detailed brushwork. These large-scale works, often inspired by photographs she takes on the street, take inspiration from portrait painters such as Alice Neel. In a statement, Casteel described the process as “meeting people where they are as opposed to asking them to enter my space.” In doing so, her portraits capture individual personalities and the cultural background of her subject.
“As sections of the painting begin to build, the weight starts to tell the story, pulling and building, with fields of color on the canvas that are sometimes almost topographical maps on somebody’s face or in their hands,” said Casteel. “Painting becomes a tool to get people to see the multiplicity of ourselves: our sadness, our joy, our love, our loss, our moments of stillness, the moments that don’t get heard.”
Born in Denver in 1989, Casteel graduated with her MFA from Yale in 2014. She presented her first solo show with Casey Kaplan in 2017, shortly after the gallery announced its representation of the artist in 2016. Since then, the artist has held solo exhibitions with the Denver Art Museum, the New Museum, High Line Art, and the Hill Art Foundation, among others.
Casteel’s work will be featured in the touring group exhibition “The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure,” opening at the North Carolina Museum of Art in March, after stints at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her work is featured in prestigious collections around the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.
“Jordan Casteel stands out in her generation of painters for her extraordinary acuteness of observation and empathetic treatment of her subjects,” said gallery founder Thaddaeus Ropac. “A magnetic sense of proximity and directness defines her painterly approach, as she intimately captures their humanity and personal spheres. She questions how to be seen and how to represent, reflecting on interconnectedness, belonging, and identity.”
Correction: A previous version of this article implied that Jordan Casteel left MASSIMODECARLO to join Thaddeus Ropac. The article has been updated to reflect that the artist stopped working MASSIMODECARLO in 2022.
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