Jeffrey Deitch is pleased to announce Still Life, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Kohshin Finley, opening November 2025. Marking his most ambitious presentation to date, the exhibition brings together monumental oil portraits integrated with ceramic vessels, seamlessly merging painting, poetry, sculpture, and design into an immersive installation rooted in memory, material, and personal mythology.

Finley, whose Black-Mexican identity and upbringing in Los Angeles anchor his practice, returns to Jeffrey Deitch after his inclusion in Shattered Glass (2021). With Still Life, he deepens his commitment to portraying his community through a lens of tenderness and truth, presenting a series of life-sized portraits framed in handcrafted walnut vitrines, which also house vessels of his own making. This exhibition extends his formal language of transparency and layering, allowing the understructure of graphite, gesso, and gestural poetry to surface as both visual and emotional code.

In the artwork, With Grace, a contemplative grayscale portrait of a woman bathed in soft light is paired with a ceramic altar of earthenware bowls and vessels. The woman’s downward gaze echoes the rhythm of the glazes below her, a subtle interplay between strength and stillness. Similarly, in Notes on a History, Finley renders a profile of a woman poised in motion, her skin illuminated by layered brushwork. Adjacent ceramic vessels mirror her presence: elegant, resilient, and deeply grounded in lineage.

“My paintings hold moments of intimacy and care,” Finley states. “There’s poetry embedded in the underpainting, not always legible but always present, like the stories we carry in our bodies. The ceramics extend that language, they’re ancestral, functional, symbolic.”

Influenced by time spent in Los Angeles, Japan, Italy, and Mexico, Finley’s ceramics reflect a dialogue between contemporary portraiture and the timelessness of the vessel. The work honors craft traditions while asserting a distinctly modern narrative: the ceramic becomes a witness, a container, and a collaborator in portraiture.

Kohshin Finley, a native Angeleno, has been steeped in creative expression since childhood, raised by artist and fashion designer parents who nurtured his early immersion in the arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Hummingbird at Barbati Gallery (Venice, IT) and Eight Artworks at Various Small Fires (Dallas, TX). Last year, a career-defining work by Finley was acquired by the Hammer Museum for its permanent collection.

Finley’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, Jeffrey Deitch, Jack Shainman Gallery, and CFHill in Stockholm. His paintings and sculptures are held in public collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Hammer Museum, Marciano Art Foundation, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He and his work have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Cultured, Essence, and The Cut, and was named one of Fine Art Connoisseur’s “Five to Watch.”