Sayre Gomez, Oceanwide Plaza, 2025 - 2026.
Sayre Gomez’s Precious Moments at David Kordansky Gallery offers a richly layered, quietly powerful exploration of Los Angeles’s urban fabric and the emotional terrains we navigate within it. Spanning the gallery’s three exhibition spaces, this first solo show with the gallery marks a significant moment in Gomez’s career, presenting new work in painting, sculpture, and video that crystallizes longstanding concerns while pushing into more intimate territory. The exhibition is on view January 16 – March 1, 2026.
From the outset, the exhibition places the viewer in the dynamic tension between surface and substance that defines Gomez’s practice. His large-scale paintings command attention with their hyper-real precision: panoramas assembled from found imagery, cellphone snapshots, and stock photography that are seamlessly merged into compositions at once familiar and uncanny. With an airbrush technique rooted in commercial retouching, Hollywood set painting, and manual sign traditions, these works feel less like traditional landscapes and more like cognitive maps—surfaces laden with signifiers of contemporary life, from strip mall signage to technological infrastructure and billboards that loom like modern totems.
A standout piece, Vertigo (2025), epitomizes this melding of spectacle and critique. Here, a vast advertisement for a fast-fashion brand crowns a downtown Art Deco edifice, its glossy promise of glamour perched above the city’s stark realities—embodied by what appears to be someone’s makeshift home in the foreground. In this visual dichotomy, Gomez captures Los Angeles not as an idealized dreamscape but as an arena where consumer fantasy and socio-economic disparity coexist, each reinforcing and undermining the other.
Yet, Precious Moments is not solely concerned with critique. Interwoven through Gomez’s imagery is a meditation on memory, nostalgia, and the ways environments shape familial experience. The artist’s turn toward the personal—particularly how his children encounter the visual language of late capitalism—adds a poignant layer to the work, making the exhibition less a detached survey of urban archetypes than a reflection on vulnerability and wonder within these systems.
In the gallery’s sculptural installation, Gomez reanimates architectural forms extracted from his painted panoramas. Pieces such as Totem 4 (2024) and Annelid (2025) translate massive, often overlooked structures—utility poles thick with generations of communication technology, playground tunnels, and even handcrafted doll figures—into tactile objects that encourage close looking. By miniaturizing these once-monumental symbols, Gomez invites viewers into an intimate engagement with materials and their embedded histories, bridging formal rigor with emotive resonance.
The exhibition culminates with Oceanwide Plaza (2025–2026), perhaps the most ambitious work here: a meticulous replica of the stalled mixed-use development that has become one of LA’s most striking architectural and cultural artifacts. As a sculptural meditation on speculation, collapse, and creative reclamation, it encapsulates Gomez’s broader project—making visible the contradictions inherent in our built environment and in the narratives we tell about progress, failure, and community.
Precious Moments resists reductive interpretation. Instead of delivering a single argument, Gomez cultivates a space where the familiar feels foreign and the overlooked becomes essential. With formal dexterity and humanist sensitivity, this exhibition stakes a powerful claim for art that sees deeply into the world we inhabit, even as it reveals what we often choose to ignore.
