Jordan Casteel Winter Sun

This exhibition of new paintings by American artist Jordan Casteel marks her first in France, as well as the most significant showing of her work in Europe to date. The artist situates her paintings – created in the first half of 2026 – in a cool, earthy palette inspired by the light in the depths of winter. Winter Sun reflects on a period of dormancy and renewal, hope and grief, love and loss, and light and darkness.

Over time, I think I’ve come to realise that my interest is far beyond the portrait. I have sought to capture the kind of breadth of an environment, the context in which my subjects are sitting: how can that help to tell the story? The subjects often come from a question: me seeing a reflection of myself in that person and wanting to ask or answer a question.

— Jordan Casteel

Casteel’s practice is rooted in the monumentalisation of the collective, offering intimate, dignified encounters that reflect her deep commitment to community. Her subjects – who are always a direct reflection of her surroundings – map and honour the social landscape of her immediate environment, as well as its artistic history. The portraits on view depict a broad spectrum of sitters, ranging from Casteel’s close circle of family and friends to strangers encountered in the spaces she inhabits.

The family forms a pyramid, like a modern Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, yet the maternal figure in Casteel’s painting is exhausted, collapsing onto the impassive father’s lap as the child gazes away, harking back to Noah Davis’ Untitled (2015). As art historian Amandine Nana writes in the exhibition catalogue, Casteel ‘implicitly evokes the labour of people of colour from the working classes and their right to rest [...] thus resonat[ing] with the development, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, of discourses on racial injustice and on the politics of rest, as well as on its repoliticisation.’

Foregoing the formality and implicit power dynamics of the traditional studio sitting, Casteel works from photographs of her subjects. ‘I am meeting people where they are, as opposed to asking them to enter my space’, she explains. Alice Neel’s figures, painted at ease, serve as an anchor to Casteel’s conception of portraiture, as does Harlem Renaissance painter Beauford Delaney’s expressionist approach to colour.

In her treatment of skin colour, [Casteel] moves beyond a uniform perception of Black and brown skin, playing with different tones and undertones; she renders the effects of light on the body and evokes the complexity of skin-tone perception, which shifts according to the light and the way it falls on the skin.

— Amandine Nana

Casteel’s paintings have always processed the external world through the lens of her own personhood, and demonstrate a sustained interest in the theme of maternal care. In recent years, however, her work has acquired a distinctly autobiographical cadence, expanding to embrace her immediate domestic sphere while preserving her profound attachment to community. In this body of work, she returns to these foundational motifs following the birth of her son: a threshold she marks in the evocatively transitional title of the exhibition, with its ‘sun’ implying the homonymous ‘son’.

Painting, mothering and gardening are deeply intertwined acts of creation, and through these parallel processes of daily, hands-on care, Casteel establishes a conceptual bridge between her portraiture and her paintings of flowers. ‘For me, it’s all about cultivating’, she explains. ‘It’s about starting from the base, whether that’s the blank space of the canvas or the empty space of land.’

Since establishing a home in the Hudson Valley in 2021, Casteel has increasingly embraced her more rural surroundings in her paintings. Several of these paintings of flowers originate in her garden, where she often works en plein air with the canvas on her lap. Treated with the same dignity as the subjects of her portraits, the bouquets and blooms are rendered with detailed consideration and often closely cropped, granting them a personified presence.

As Amandine Nana writes, ‘Jordan Casteel’s representation of bouquets can certainly find a genealogy in the still-life genre of the French Impressionist painters, but also a more local genealogy of enduring creativity and of the importance of the experience of beauty in the everyday as a form of resilience.’ Nana discerns a ‘ceremonial and ritual dimension’ in Casteel’s floral paintings that shares affinities with the self-taught Louisiana artist Clementine Hunter (1886/87–1988), a domestic servant on a former plantation whose paintings of bouquets capture their vital role in the life of her community, from christenings to funerals.

The comings and goings of life are the key to what this exhibition is about: the ways in which we care for each other and nurture life in the best ways that we can, knowing that things move on eventually as well. It’s not just about the grief, it’s not just about the celebration of life, it’s about the way that we all have to move through life with the intermingling of those two experiences.

— Jordan Casteel

Casteel collapses the distinctions between landscape and portrait, and between the varied urban and rural settings that feature in her most recent works to create modern-day vanitas that give form to time, absence and remembrance. She offers all her subjects equal consideration, giving each as much weight as the next as part of the unfolding landscape of life. Ultimately, these works remind us that amid the ebb and flow of love and loss, growth and grief, the act of witnessing – and tending to – our lived environments remains the most profound act of all.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition, this catalogue, which features an essay by Amandine Nana, who is a writer, poet, art historian and curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, documents Casteel’s new body of work.

Download the press release