Overview
Thaddaeus Ropac London presents three new paintings by Jordan Casteel, on view in the Ely Room. Born in Denver and now based in New York, Casteel is known for her magnetic, larger-than-life compositions that combine empathetic storytelling with bold, luminescent colour. The presentation follows the recent announcement of Casteel’s representation by Thaddaeus Ropac in February this year, as well as the artist’s inclusion in the major group exhibition The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, which travelled from the National Portrait Gallery, London, to The Box in Plymouth, Philadelphia Museum of Art and North Carolina Museum of Art (2024–25). The presentation at Thaddaeus Ropac London will coincide with London Gallery Weekend, 6–8 June 2025, during which the artist will participate in an ‘In Conversation’ event at the gallery.
The works on view capture Jordan Casteel’s ever-deepening kinship with the communities and environments she inhabits. Since establishing a home in the Hudson Valley alongside her base in Harlem in 2021, Casteel has found new opportunities to weave the textures of these natural surroundings with her closely felt observations, while continuing to explore themes of rootedness and belonging. Elizabeth and Roman II (2025) is an exceptional example of the portraiture that first launched the artist to acclaim. A mother stands in a garden with a young child propped against her hip; his weight is supported by her sinuously rendered hands as he turns to join his mother in meeting the artist’s gaze. Details of the composition signal the changing season as winter transitions into spring: pink budding flowers peek through shaded areas of moss, emerging from a warm pastel-pink ground. Casteel often begins her paintings with an expansive field of electric colour: ‘the gesture of covering the canvas in a colour is setting the stage for the rest of the painting,’ she says. ‘It becomes an aura, an essence of the work.’
The works on view capture Jordan Casteel’s ever-deepening kinship with the communities and environments she inhabits. Since establishing a home in the Hudson Valley alongside her base in Harlem in 2021, Casteel has found new opportunities to weave the textures of these natural surroundings with her closely felt observations, while continuing to explore themes of rootedness and belonging. Elizabeth and Roman II (2025) is an exceptional example of the portraiture that first launched the artist to acclaim. A mother stands in a garden with a young child propped against her hip; his weight is supported by her sinuously rendered hands as he turns to join his mother in meeting the artist’s gaze. Details of the composition signal the changing season as winter transitions into spring: pink budding flowers peek through shaded areas of moss, emerging from a warm pastel-pink ground. Casteel often begins her paintings with an expansive field of electric colour: ‘the gesture of covering the canvas in a colour is setting the stage for the rest of the painting,’ she says. ‘It becomes an aura, an essence of the work.’
I knew when I asked to paint Elizabeth and Roman, in some ways they were my own mirroring of desire. The paintings become surrogates for my own thinking or desires, or a sense of longing or curiosity. — Jordan Casteel
On view alongside Casteel’s portraiture is a painting from the artist’s celebrated Subway Series: an ongoing body of work begun in 2015 in which train carriages become the perfect backdrops for looking. In Subway Bouquet (2025), an overflowing floral arrangement takes the place of a figure, positioned centrally on an orange plastic subway seat. Cascading tassels of amaranthus, fuschia flowers and rose-pink cosmos petals reflect in an adjacent glass pane to produce a mesmerising double image. Through this visual mirroring – itself an experiment in form, colour and texture – Casteel explores her own intersecting worlds of Hudson Valley and New York City, and the relationship between objecthood and personhood.
I always think of the paintings as being an opportunity for other people to slow down to observe something that they maybe haven't seen before or seen in this way before. Whether it is a person, whether it is a street scene, whether it is my garden or the environment that I am in. — Jordan Casteel
In recent years, Casteel has created intimate, small-scale portraits of flowers, painted en plein air in her upstate garden. Painted in springtime, Iris (2024) captures the titular flower mid-bloom. Daubs, flecks and outlines are traces of the artist’s hand, working intuitively, wet on wet, to feel out shape in real time. Treated with the same dignity as the figures who populate her portraits, Iris is a contemplation on the physicality of paint itself.
Following her London presentation, Jordan Casteel will have her first solo exhibition in France at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais in 2026.
Jordan Casteel lives and works in New York. Having first enrolled as a sociology and anthropology major, she received her BA in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College in 2011, and MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2014. From 2016 to 2021, she taught as an associate professor of painting at Rutgers University-Newark - the series of portraits she made of her students there were hung in the first room of her acclaimed solo museum show Within Reach at New Museum, New York (2020). In 2024, Casteel was the subject of a solo exhibition spanning the past decade of her practice at the Hill Art Foundation, New York. She has also presented solo exhibitions at institutions including the Denver Art Museum (2019) and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University (2019-20). In 2019, New York's High Line Art commissioned a 1,400-square-foot mural of Casteel's painting The Baayfalls. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2021), the John Koch Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters (both 2024) and is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (as of 2023).
Casteel's work was recently included in The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2024, which travelled to The Box, Plymouth; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. The artist has also participated in group exhibitions at Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); Baltimore Museum of Art (2023); Saint Louis Art Museum (2023); New Orleans Museum of Art (2023); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2023); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021-23); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2022); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020); the Art Institute of Chicago (2021); and the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles (2018).
