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Get matched →David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Italian, Ethiopian-born painter Jem Perucchini (b. 1995), opening at the gallery’s Tribeca location in New York. This will be the artist’s first exhibition in the United States, following recent solo presentations at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville.
The exhibition takes its title from a painting on view, Sospiro (2026), which translates from Italian as “sigh.” A sigh—at once a breath, a pause, a release, a gesture—holds significance for Perucchini because of its qualities both essential and transient, audible and invisible. As the artist describes, this fleeting moment of vitality represents “the passage between the inner self and the external world, between soul and body, between what is held within and what is released.”
Perucchini’s distinctive body of work draws on a range of influences, from early Italian Renaissance painting and the patterns of African wax print textiles to ancient Greek mythology and frescoes in Ethiopian churches. Populating seemingly familiar narrative scenes with a singular cast of characters often youthful, lithe, and inscrutable in appearance, Perucchini expands the language of figurative painting while deftly mining tropes from religious iconography and traditional portraiture. Many compositions present single or paired subjects in ambiguous situations; other works reference iconic mythical figures, such as Icarus, Narcissus, Inanna, and Gilgamesh, among others. Perucchini’s figures, largely rendered from imagination, are often shown with gazes askance, almost saintlike, as they look far beyond their intricately textured environments toward an unseen world. Existing outside of any familiar historical chronology, Perucchini’s scenes evoke timeless tensions and nuances of the human experience—solitude and partnership, the archetype and the individual, light and darkness. Dominated by monochromatic jewellike hues and frequently illuminated by a glowing spherical moon or sun, Perucchini’s paintings are as much about surface as they are about content. Through a time-intensive process, the artist sprays his canvases with an oil-based emulsion to create a rich, mottled finish, as if the new work has taken on an otherworldly patina.
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This show includes Perucchini’s first public presentation of his drawings; the two compositions on view are his largest works on paper to date. These enigmatic graphite portraits each depict a solitary figure engaged in a game of chess—a recurring motif in the artist’s work wherein the chessboard occupies a space between being and becoming, and each move gives form to what is possible while leaving the unexpected unresolved.