Kim Gordon

American musician, singer, songwriter and artist Kim Gordon is one of the world’s foremost musical and creative talents, best known as the co-founder of experimental rock band Sonic Youth, which released 16 studio albums before disbanding in 2011. In the subsequent decade, Gordon has focused on solo creative projects, including several art exhibitions, and authoring a memoir, Girl in a Band (Harper Collins, 2015). Gordon has additionally appeared as an actor, and as herself, in television productions including Girls, Animals, and Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. Her first solo record, No Home Record, was released in 2019. 

Gordon’s artworks include the ongoing ‘Noise Painting’ series, depicting the names of experimental and noise groups; a series of paintings depicting the names of contemporary galleries and gallery owners; works from the untitled ‘From The Boyfriend’ series – Rorschach-like images painted on used denim skirts; ‘Twitter Paintings’ sourced from the Twitter streams of Girls producer Jenni Konner, critic Jerry Saltz, and artist Richard Prince among others; and her ‘Wreath Paintings’, which employ the decorative folk forms as stencils to produce vertiginous colour abstractions. An insistence on dismantling the hierarchical sanctity of the object has become a through line in Gordon’s practice, and in her most recent work, canvases are treated with direct application of paints, resins, glitters and fiberglass, as well as physical manipulation. Performing a painting becomes its own medium, as finished works are crumpled, overturned and flung. Fixed between states of de- and re-composition, battle scars from past performances become gestural abstraction via mischievous punk irreverence.