David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present Precious Moments, an exhibition of new paintings, sculpture, and videos by Sayre Gomez. On view from January 16 through March 1, 2026, Precious Moments is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will span all three spaces at its Los Angeles location. An opening reception will be held on Friday, January 16, from 6 to 8 PM.

Sayre Gomez has become recognized as one of contemporary art’s keenest observers of American urban life. His latest exhibition of large-scale photorealistic paintings, meticulously realized sculptures, and new explorations into video and wall painting reveal an evolving, deeply considered engagement with the sprawling landscape of Los Angeles. His work is critical, romantic, precise, doubting, and hopeful—questioning authenticity, memory, and how we see and interpret history in the present tense. Precious Moments extends this inquiry into more personal territory, considering how the artist’s children encounter an environment saturated with the visual language of late capitalism, and how these encounters shape his own understanding.  Presenting the fullest expression of Gomez’s vision to date, the exhibition brings together themes the artist has explored throughout his practice: the fetishization of youth and nostalgia as a response to mortality, the communication systems—both macro and micro—that define contemporary life, and the ways our built environment provides clues as to what we value as individuals and as a society.

Gomez’s paintings depict Los Angeles through composite images, combining what he calls a “documentary impulse” with sophisticated formal construction. Found imagery, cell phone photos, and stock photography are merged using techniques he has honed over years—an amalgamation of commercial photo retouching, Hollywood set painting, manual sign painting traditions, and digital tools—revealing a highly sensitive mind attuned to the codes by which civilization both reveals and obscures its intentions. His use of analog tools of reproduction embraces technical precision, connecting not only to notions of craft and labor but also to the empirical truth-seeking inherent in the histories of painting and photography. Rather than directly depicting socio-political structures of inequity and dysfunction, Gomez’s work draws on imagery that exists as reflections of what these systems produce: the easily interchangeable grid of strip mall signage, the technological layering of communication infrastructure, and the billboard as spectacle looming over the landscape.

The painting Vertigo (2025) makes manifest the collision of spectacle and decay characteristic of Gomez’s work. A colossal advertisement for the fast-fashion brand Fashion Nova perched atop a landmark Art Deco building in downtown Los Angeles is foregrounded by a vehicle seemingly functioning as someone’s home. The billboard depicts a model airbrushed to perfection, clad in a fifteen-dollar bodycon dress promising instant glamour above a city where housing has increasingly become an unaffordable luxury. The painting in its totality becomes an emblem of the dichotomies implicit in his work. Stark inequality, widespread voyeuristic exposure, and a hierarchy of visibility, all rendered in magic hour light, operate as a cognitive mapping of late America as seen through the cultural and economic specificity of Southern California.

Gomez’s sculptures focus on singular architectural forms that could be a protagonist drawn directly from one of his paintings. These three-dimensional works translate visually complex, monumental structures into reduced scales that allow them to occupy an intimate spatial relationship with the viewer. In works such as Totem 4 (2024), a scaled replica of a utility pole gathers multiple generations of communication technology, while handmade flyers and advertisements anchor the work within a specific moment in time. Rendered with exacting precision, these once-overlooked structures are elevated into objects that invite reverence and sustained contemplation. Annelid (2025), a caterpillar-shaped playground tunnel, along with the Precious Moments–inspired doll figures installed in the gallery rafters, similarly repurpose familiar objects and childhood imagery to explore nostalgia, innocence, and the social systems that shape everyday life. By miniaturizing these massive symbols, Gomez makes them newly visible—not as a gesture of mastery or ownership, but as a means of closer looking.

The exhibition culminates with Oceanwide Plaza (2025–2026), the artist’s most ambitious and complex sculpture to date. A scale recreation of the unfinished mixed-use development that has become one of LA’s most visible landmarks, the work examines how a single structure can embody the cascading failures of global capitalism, municipal governance, and speculative real estate. The Oceanwide Plaza towers—abandoned in 2019 when their Chinese investors ran out of funds—were taken over in 2024 by graffiti artists who climbed the buildings, covering their facades in tags and murals visible from the freeway. What began as a symbol of transnational capital’s ambitions became a monument to its collapse, and then a site of unauthorized creative reclamation. Gomez’s replica captures this layered history, rendering both the architectural skeleton and its accumulation of illicit markings with painstaking precision. The sculpture distills Gomez’s broader project of making visible the contradictions embedded in the built environment, where corporate aspiration, systemic breakdown, and grassroots expression occupy the same contested space.

Precious Moments resists easy cynicism or didacticism. Gomez approaches his subjects through what he describes as “a humanist lens on a macro scale,” attentive to the fact that the systems in which we live are shaped by people who, in turn, live with their long-term consequences. His works balance critique with care, acknowledging “the smoldering ruins just outside the frame” while rendering the most familiar environments with sustained formal and aesthetic attention. Through paintings that trace the layered histories of the urban landscape and sculptures that bring overlooked structures into focus, the exhibition offers a sustained meditation on how time is marked, meaning is produced, and the conditions of contemporary American life are understood, shaped by an ongoing effort to consider both the world that formed the artist and the one he now inhabits.