Jordan Casteel, Elizabeth and Roman II, 2025, Oil on canvas, 94 x 80 inches
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.’
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.