Overduin & Co. is pleased to present a solo exhibition by New York based artist, Eliza Douglas. The exhibition is titled Guggenheim and features a group of new works from an ongoing series of paintings, each wrapped, as a gift, in a three-dimensional bow.

The paintings are installed upon mise-en-scène textile backdrops depicting the iconic Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition roughly simulates an imagined museum show. The fluid theatre-like scrims are draped over the gallery walls, layering images of the museum’s exterior façade and ramped interior spiral.

Douglas’s bow paintings illustrate found images of digitally constructed landscapes rendered in oil on canvas. A sculptural ribbon is wrapped around the support, each ribbon carrying a different motif that elaborates on or contrasts with the painting’s subject.

The bow is a symbol, and as much a part of the painting as it is not. This addition not only underscores the painting’s intrinsic flatness but also obscures its content. Rather than solely presenting an image, the focus shifts to the painting as an object.

Douglas’s involvement with commercial fashion and her most recent series of exhibitions underscore issues of style and agency within the art industry and throughout the career of an artist.

Past projects in which Douglas self-assigns context for her work include a solo installation of paintings for an art fair booth in which she exchanged her gallery’s booth sign for a Gagosian booth sign. Fair visitors initially experienced the installation as the artist’s first fair presentation with “blue chip” gallery, Gagosian.

For a solo gallery exhibition in Oslo, Douglas titled the show, Whitney Biennial. Opening on the same evening as the biennial in New York, Douglas hung her most recent series of paintings on printed backdrops of the Whitney.

Douglas has also taken on the work of other artists in her own work, as with a pair of solo exhibitions both titled, Josh Smith. For Douglas’s gallery shows in Los Angels and Paris, the artist presented paintings of Smith’s paintings from his various exhibitions at The Brant Foundation and David Zwirner gallery among other such venues.

Prior to this series of projects, Douglas’s paintings focused on the many cultural genres illustrated in the graphics found on T-shirts, from heavy metal and goth imagery to Disney characters. Douglas’s paintings depicted the folds and ripples of these printed textiles in digitally exaggerated swirls. The graphics of these garments projected a social context for the individual at the scale of the body, just as the set dressing of the gallery in printed museum backdrops conjures a context for the artworks that the artist is choosing and creating for herself.