Thaddaeus Ropac has taken on the representation of Jordan Casteel in collaboration with the New York gallery Casey Kaplan, which has represented the American painter since 2016.
Ropac’s first exhibition of new paintings by Casteel will take place in its London space in April, followed by her first solo show in Europe at its Paris gallery next year. Casteel was previously represented by Massimo de Carlo gallery, which she joined in 2021 and where she had an acclaimed solo show, There is a Season, in its London premises during Frieze week in October of that year.
Born in Denver, now living and working in New York, Casteel takes inspiration from figurative painters such as Alice Neel and the people and communities in which she lives for her vibrant, large-scale works. Instead of asking her subjects to pose within a traditional studio, Casteel often photographs them where she encounters them, “meeting people where they are as opposed to asking them to enter my space”.
Jordan Casteel, Naima’s Gift (Deon, Kym and Noah, 2023)
Photo: David Schulze. © Jordan Casteel. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery
Painting, Casteel says, “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”. Her subjects are key, but so is the process in drawing them out: “As sections of the painting begin to build, the weight starts to tell the story, pulling and building, with fields of colour on the canvas that are sometimes almost topographical maps on somebody’s face or in their hands.”
Casteel’s work is included in the touring exhibition The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, which opens next month at the North Carolina Museum of Art, having travelled from London’s National Portrait Gallery (2024) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2024–25).
“Jordan Casteel stands out in her generation of painters for her extraordinary acuteness of observation, and empathetic treatment of her subjects,” says Thaddaeus Ropac, whose gallery now represents over 70 artists. “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.”