SPENCER FINCH

At the center of the Los Angeles exhibition are Finch’s Gorgeous Nothings, a new series of works on paper inspired by Emily Dickinson’s practice of composing poems on discarded envelopes. Finch meticulously recreates envelopes collected from the street, his personal correspondence, and the junk mail delivered to the studio by hand on archival paper before transforming it through interventions in watercolor, pastel, ink, colored pencil, collage, and other media. Drawing upon the tradition of trompe l’oeil, the works blur distinctions between reproduction and invention, illusion and object, while foregrounding the histories embedded within everyday materials. Installed unframed and affixed directly to the wall with magnets, the drawings project subtly into space in a sprawling, constellation-like arrangement, their folds, shadows, postmarks, handwritten markings, and layered surfaces emphasizing both their sculptural presence and intimate materiality.

Across the series, Finch locates moments of wonder within the overlooked textures of daily life. The works depict fleeting yet personal observations: sunlight reflecting across the surface of the Gowanus Canal, the drifting path of dust particles through the artist’s studio, coffee cup rings, a grocery list, shadows cast against a table, and other quiet atmospheric shifts that might otherwise go unnoticed. The Gorgeous Nothings also recall earlier bodies of work by Finch, including his Color Notes and the Blooming Calendar, in which systems of notation, accumulation, and observation become ways of recording the passing of time. Here, however, the use of the envelope introduces an additional register of intimacy and circulation, objects that have traveled through the world carrying traces of private exchange, now reimagined as sites of reflection and invention.

Throughout the exhibition, Finch extends this sensitivity to atmosphere into the architecture of the gallery itself. Colored filters installed across the skylights transform the quality of light within the space, shifting Los Angeles’s warm yellow daylight toward the cooler blue tones of Amherst, Massachusetts, informed by light measurements Finch made of a passing cloud in Emily Dickinson’s garden. The immersive installation continues Finch’s decades-long engagement with light as both subject and medium and joins a significant body of works and commissions that translate fleeting atmospheric conditions into physical experience, including Moonlight (Reflected in a Pond__) (2025), Mars (Sunrise) (2016), and his 120-meter cloud canopy for Paddington Station’s Elizabeth Line in London (2022).

Outside the gallery, Finch presents Wreck (Raft of the Medusa) (2026), a monumental sculpture derived from a found dumpster and reimagined through the histories of Romantic painting, Dada, assemblage, and the readymade. Referencing Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, the work translates key elements of the painting into sculptural form: large pieces of reclaimed wood evoke the raft itself, while used nautical rope, fabric, a bag, and a hatchet recall the improvised materials and desperate conditions of the shipwrecked survivors. Acting as a kind of enclosure, the dumpster contains and frames these components much as the surrounding sea contains the raft in Géricault’s composition, transforming a vessel of disposal into a site of survival, memory, and reinvention. The dumpster’s exterior is layered with paint, posters, stickers, and a prominent “Medusa” graffiti tag, employing the visual language of the street to parallel the expressive force of Romantic painting. Through deliberate accretions of mark-making and color, Finch translates the emotional intensity and drama of Géricault’s canvas into the contemporary vernacular of urban surfaces. Occupying a space between monument and detritus, ruin and renewal, the sculpture functions simultaneously as a pile of found materials and a meticulously composed assemblage.

Courtesy Lisson Gallery.