Eliza Douglas at Gagosian Park & 75: A Painting Show Where the UV Print Is the Subject

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 17, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Eliza Douglas at Gagosian Park & 75: A Painting Show Where the UV Print Is the Subject At a Glance Cross-town. GHOSTS at Gagosian's Park & 75 townhouse pairs Eliza Douglas's mixed-media paintings with UV-printed photographs by her aunt, and the surface fight between oil and ink film is the show's actual argument. The wall I want to talk about is at Park & 75. Gagosian’s townhouse outpost, where Francesco Bonami has just opened the first show in a curatorial series he is calling, in his press statement, “a laboratory of fresh perspectives that will complement the gallery’s existing programming.” The first lab subject is Eliza Douglas. The show is called GHOSTS. It opened May 12 and runs through July 31. A canvas listed in the press release is “81 1/8 x 62 1/2 inches (206.1 x 158.8 cm), oil on canvas with UV printing.” That second clause is the entire show. Douglas paints, then overprints those painting s with UV-cured ink images supplied by her aunt Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist who has reported on UFOs and unexplained phenomena for years. The photographic images partially veil the painted surfaces underneath. Bonami’s framing is “meta-painting.” Mine, standing in the room: this is a painter literally putting a piece of plastic between her own painted decisions and the viewer’s eye, and asking what survives. The substrate fight: what UV ink does on top of oil paint Here is the painter’s read I want to leave with active collectors. UV printing is a flat, fused ink film with no real surface. It does not absorb light. It bounces it off in a single plane. Oil paint, even when it is being deliberately smooth, has tooth. It catches light from inside the body of the pigment, the way only ground minerals and oil can. When a UV print sits over an oil surface, the print does not become part of the painting. It hovers a fraction of a millimeter above it. The painting underneath is doing its full job, and a layer of photographic light-flatness is sitting on top of it pretending to be the work. The print does not become part of the painting. It hovers a fraction of a millimeter above it. Why Park & 75 is the right room for it That is what the installation at Park & 75 is doing, and it is the right room for it. The space is small enough that the canvases meet the eye at near reading distance. A flat photographic overlay over an oil ground reads completely differently at twenty inches than it does at a museum’s twenty feet. Bonami’s choice of the townhouse, rather than the big West 24th Street box, is the curatorial wedge. The work needs intimacy to land the trick. That said, I have a critic-adjacent thought to flag honestly. The “ghosts” framing pulls the show toward Gagosian’s 2022 London group exhibition Haunted Realism. The lineage is doing some heavy lifting in the press copy. Going to the room, the more useful question is not whether photography haunts painting (the answer is yes; that conversa