Sayre Gomez

Interview by Diana Nawi

I think of Sayre Gomez’s work often. His carefully observed and meticulously executed paintings and sculptures have redefined how I see the city I live in––they are top of mind every time I drive past a Spirit Halloween store, or a carefully gridded lightbox sign with 12 different fonts for each store in a strip mall, when I look up and see an exquisite sunset illuminating some abandoned, trashed building, or notice a particularly layered surface of signs, images, grime, and graffiti. His is an approach to painting that has given me a contemporary definition of craft, labor, and the vernacular within this high art form. It has created a runway for a generation of painters after him in their approach and imagery, and a framework with which to discuss it. It answers anxieties about the relationship between photography and painting, revealing what each can only do and what they can do in dialogue with one another. It reveals the necessary marriage between sincerity and cynicism in this moment.

Sayre and I spoke about crying in front of an artwork. His work makes me wonder why I ever want to cry when there’s such a breadth of other responses I can have. Yes, I want to feel, but I want to think and understand and, especially, I want to see and to know what I can learn from seeing.

[This interview was conducted in 2025. It has been edited and condensed.]

Diana Nawi (DN): Oh my God. Hi! It’s been a long time since we’ve seriously talked about your practice—or maybe this is the first time we’ll do that. We’ve known each other for so long now, I thought this would be a good excuse to do our jobs together—thanks for the invitation to chat. How are you? What’s happening?

Sayre Gomez (SG): Hey, hey, hey. Always a lot going on. Getting ready for a big show [at David Kordansky Gallery] in January.

DN: Here in L.A.? That’s great! So is that what you’re working on right now?

SG: Yeah, in overdrive right now.

DN: Amazing. I’m excited for January. How do you start working on a show? With an idea or outline, or do you produce a lot and then structure and edit?

SG: A little of both. I design the exhibition and make the plans for the paintings at the same time. I try to make my shows really cohesive, so I start with a virtual model of the gallery and build out the exhibition at the same time that I’m planning the work. My last big show was at [Xavier] Hufkens [“Sayre Gomez: Heaven ‘N’ Earth,” January–March 2024]. The space is four stories and you don’t necessarily navigate it in a linear way. There were a lot of moving parts. The experience of the show was strange; it wasn’t as straightforward.

DN: Right, curating. The show really has to develop spatially, each work in relation to the other. You have to curate the flow, manage the traffic a little bit...which gallery space is the new show in?

SG: It’s the whole space. The main building and the smaller galleries in the back.

DN: Oh, that’s a lot! How are you thinking about it?

SG: Since I had my kids, my work has become more concerned with the human experience—coming of age—and thinking about living in this particular time and what it means to be a child or a parent. We’re all children or parents. There is a sort of humanistic impulse that I’m trying to put back into the work in different ways, mostly through some of the sculptures. In my Hufkens show, I was starting to interject some of that; it was there with the inclusion of stuffed animals, for instance. A lot of paintings had iconography from my kids’ world.

There will be examples of some new imagery, some different mediums, and an expansion on previous sculptures. There may be some videos that find their way into the show. The work that I’ve been making for the past decade or so, it’s not that topical. It’s not about one specific thing; it’s about a collection of ideas that interconnect.

“Since I had my kids, my work has become more concerned with the human experience—coming of age—and thinking about living in this particular time and what it means to be a child or a parent. We’re all children or parents.”

Installation view, “Sayre Gomez: Precious Moments,” January 16–March 1, 2026, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery.

DN: I feel like you’ve always been a bit resistant to any sort of “about-ness,” any sort of single subject or content as such. Our conversations were much more about painting and image, more conceptual, fundamental questions about the medium, structural problems. I would always want to assign a certain kind of content to it, removed from questions of materiality, and that always felt incorrect. Our last visit was before the work [for Hufkens] shipped out, and the work was really dark. It felt like the world had entered your practice in a different way. It hasn’t changed so dramatically, but the iconography and symbolism is undoubtedly stronger—there’s more pathos in the work.

A few years ago, when we were talking about this younger L.A. generation coming up after you, whose work has a strong relationship to yours, you distinguished between the practices almost through the order of the primacy of form and content. Content, the thing in the picture, the image, seems to be the lead in conversations about their work and you said, “that’s not what I’m doing.” It made me take a step back and return to technique and, again, those fundamental questions of the medium. Now, I think your work can more comfortably host both those conversations. Nonetheless, for me, you still opened the door for how I think about their work, for the possibility of talking about that work. Do you think about that? Do you think…I invented some version of this?

SG: [chuckle] It’s cool; it’s always a little weird when you first notice it, or when people start bringing it to your attention. Everybody just has some fear, because when that starts happening, you have to think, “is that person going to have more success than me?” Or, “should I be credited for this?” But I think it’s cool; it’s great. I didn’t invent shit. Sure, I opened some doors in some ways, but I copy from so many other people, too. The whole thing is very up for grabs, the notion of originality is a stretch. Now though, more than ever, things turn into niches very quickly, turn into trends very quickly, so it’s interesting to see the echo chamber play out in real time, and in such a short amount of time.

DN: You’re candid about your influences, your lineages. You’re deeply aware of painting’s history; you have your touchstones.

SG: The difference you’re pointing out, said more simply: It’s a younger movement and they’re coming to it through social media and through representations. Whereas, how I arrived at [these questions] is very different. It was through a decade of experimentation and trying to figure out what I wanted to make. Of course, it depends on who we’re talking about; we’re talking about this in a very generalized way.

DN: I think we’re talking about including, or returning to, the vernacular and the revelation of skill within a work of art—not necessarily the hand, but rather the craft.

SG: It’s coming back into the idea of craft, embracing that idea, which was eschewed for generations. Something had to be highly stylized [in your own hand] to be valued as unique. That kind of painting—something stylized, something personal—has been embraced for a while. But the virtuosic painting that is essentially straight copying, it’s in vogue again now, or it’s become more acceptable. Whereas before, there was sort of an attitude of, “Why would you do that? Just take a photo.” What was acceptable was making a masterful representation of something with your own stylistic flourishes. Now, straight mimicry is somehow exciting again.

DN: But you’ve always been obfuscating painting, and rejecting that stylization; you were never trying to indicate that you were picking up a brush.

Sayre Gomez, Fire Season (7), 2023; Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and Xavier Hufkens. Photo: Morgan Waltz.

SG: Making a photorealistic painting using airbrush has meaning because airbrush is traditionally outside this gamut of what’s been accepted and taught. It has a politics to it, in and of itself. It’s tapping into a history that’s about something else, and that is never not in conversation with photography. From its inception [airbrushing], the material itself, the tool, was invented to retouch photographs.

“Making a photorealistic painting using airbrush has meaning because airbrush is traditionally outside this gamut of what’s been accepted and taught. It has a politics to it, in and of itself. It’s tapping into a history that’s about something else, and that is never not in conversation with photography.”

DN: It also taps into that history of sign painters, Rosenquist and Ruscha…

SG: Ed [studied commercial art at Chouinard]—he studied advertising before he became an artist. He knows how to use airbrush the way it’s supposed to be used, in this technical, procedural way that’s part of trade school, or that used to be. Obviously Ed’s very inspiring for me, but that specific little kernel of information is really interesting…he came out of a trade school background. Back then, at Chouinard, even though fine art and commercial art were not so separate, and he specifically studied commercial art. Rosenquist is similar; he was a little bit older than Ed, but they were both in that first pop art show, the one Walter Hopps curated [“New Painting of Common Objects,” 1962, Pasadena Art Museum].

It’s the same thing with Alfonso [Gonzalez Jr.]; he and his dad had the sign painting business together, he learned how to paint through doing those things. To me, that’s one of the coolest things about Alfonso—he didn’t go to school to learn how to be a painter. He learned by painting, and through this very specified craft, which is a real vocation.

It’s funny because I went to art school, but then I had to teach myself how to paint like that. They don’t really teach you how to paint anymore either, so you figure it out on your own anyway. The voices around you are very much prioritizing oil [painting] and they’re definitely not showing you an ad that’s been reproduced at seven stories on the side of a building, which to me is sick in and of itself. It’d be so cool to make a painting that’s seven stories.

DN: Right, [laughs] I never learned to paint either. It’s interesting to me that you were able to, on the one hand, learn from and get deeply entrenched in art school and, on the other hand, figure something out that I really think of as uniquely yours. Almost rejecting something about school but also doubling down on painting’s relevance.

Sayre Gomez, Family Haircuts, 2025; Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Jeff McLane. © Sayre Gomez.

SG: Part of being in grad school [at CalArts] was learning about the history of people who went to that school. When I first learned about Jack [Goldstein] and how he used this infrastructure of Hollywood to make his whole practice, it really got me thinking about how open the door can be. I thought, “Oh, shit, all bets are off. You can do this. This thing is up to you.” Having an introduction to conceptual art at CalArts—I got to study with Michael Asher and the post-studio Baldessari ethos was still there (it probably still is)—set the parameters for me in a pretty expansive way.

DN: I remember watching a Paul McCartney video when I got to UCLA…that was the moment when I realized, you can do anything, anything. I grew up seeing a lot of art, and still, seeing that video changed things for me. I didn’t necessarily think, this is liberating; I thought “oh wow…no…oh my god.” But it definitely expanded things. With you, I find it counterintuitive. What you took from the liberatory lessons of art school, was, actually, I’m gonna be really retrograde and learn a skill.

SG: Alex Israel’s grad show was all stuff that he rented from prop houses; that’s what Jack would do. These easy answers to complex issues seemed smart. That’s how conceptual art works.

DN: So how did you start making art? Conceptual art comes later, but how did you get into painting?

SG: I was making paintings about paintings, and they’re abstractions, quotationally. You go through a lot of different phases as an artist, trying on different hats. I was always into drawing. I was always into making stuff; I felt the best when I got my hands dirty. I always would say in studio visits, “if I’m ever able to hire anyone, I would hire an idea person, and then I would just make everything.” I like making stuff and I always have.

That’s the one pitfall of the conceptual framework—it sort of teaches you that anything you do with your body is dumb. There’s an elitism there; you’ll just get a fabricator or a craftsperson. You’re the artist, so you’re about brains, and the body is for someone else to deal with. And, let’s be fair, that’s how capitalism has suppressed minorities for… forever.

Why is that? I felt like, I actually enjoy doing this and it’s fun. I’m learning how to do this; I’m watching YouTube videos on how to make faux wood grain. Then I’m doing it and it looks sick. There’s something really satisfying about that.

I started learning about the history of stencil-making, how they were made and used to really enlarge an image. After learning this and investigating how sign makers would use stencils for wall text and imagemaking, I started using a vinyl plotter to explore more ways to use these processes in my own work. When I got my own vinyl plotter, I started figuring out how I could expand from here, using computer programs to streamline and become more efficient and more team oriented, so I could include assistants in a really hands-on way. We could work together and figure it out as we go.

It’s a kind of problem solving. I’m interested in the process, but the end result is what matters the most for everybody else. I find that there’s a populism built into that technicality that people revel in. That was getting lost for a long time.

“You go through a lot of different phases as an artist, trying on different hats. I was always into drawing. I was always into making stuff; I felt the best when I got my hands dirty. I always would say in studio visits, ‘if I’m ever able to hire anyone, I would hire an idea person, and then I would just make everything.’”

DN: I work with a lot of artists who have ideas, and then the institution works with them to realize it—to figure out how to make it and implement it sometimes with them, sometimes for them.

SG: Oh, I’ve never put anything like that on anyone else.

DN: Right, you would learn the skill set. Even though there’s a parallel in the process—I have an idea, I have to get there, and I don’t know how to get there—I don’t think of artists who work like that as conceptual artists. I don’t think they think of themselves like that. But the job of the people around them is to arrive at that thing, to problem solve. But your impulse, the development of such precise technical skill and the creation of a system of making, is really different but somehow (and maybe, weirdly) closer to conceptual art.

Sayre Gomez, Your One Stop Shop (Pink Panther), 2025; Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Jeff McLane. © Sayre Gomez.

SG: In my work, I just advanced on some things, like the stencil. People always made stencils, especially for commercial illustration. Even into the ’90s, the main way people would use airbrush was using stencils with other little tricks and tips and stuff to create something, and then it would be rephotographed, and then that would become the artwork for whatever said product was. For instance, the Metallica “Ride the Lightning” cover or the Star Trek movie poster or whatever—all of that is airbrushed.

That’s another reason why I was so into [airbrushing]. Everything was painted back in the day; they didn’t use computers for anything, everything was real painted objects. I went and studied with Dru Blair, who has this small school in South Carolina. He’s the premiere, he’s probably the most talented photorealist alive. He’s the artist who made the Budweiser frog posters and the Michael Jordan commemorative plates. In his studio are all the original paintings for all these ads and other things you’ve seen. They look like photos. Seeing all of that, I was like, holy fuck—it’s all painted. These are all paintings. As a person who is coming from skateboarding and graffiti, I have the ethos of being outside or retrograde or transgressive…

DN: Right, you’re not married to high culture.

SG: So here’s a way of painting that’s antithetical to everything that’s at the [School of the] Art Institute [of Chicago]. It makes money—not the same amount of money—but it’s a different way. It’s a different model, and it’s never really been tapped. Pop art happened, but we never truly got into how those paintings were made. It was just sort of glossed over. We were studying the final painting, the icon, the soup can: the symbol for the larger thing. It was never introspective or inquisitive.

One of my favorite things is to learn about how a system works, or how a factory works. Even in all these commercially produced things, there are still people doing a lot. Maybe less and less now, but there are still people on an assembly line, even if things are being made differently than they once were. So even though I have created an updated version of producing paintings, I’m referencing a system that is outmoded now. People respond to something when they can tell that it’s not easily made. And that’s probably true now more than ever, as things are increasingly machine-made.

“Pop art happened, but we never truly got into how those paintings were made. It was just sort of glossed over. We were studying the final painting, the icon, the soup can: the symbol for the larger thing. It was never introspective or inquisitive.”

DN: But the work is not inherently nostalgic, and if it is, it’s subtextual. I appreciate the perspective, the politics, that you’re bringing to the technical and the way that complicates the image-object-photo-representation conversation. I like that we can talk about the final painting, and its content, and what it does as a work of art, but I also love that there’s so much to think about in the overall practice, in the processes and the technicality (but that’s also not the sole conversation).

SG: They inform each other. I think it’s important that no stone is unturned. It’s important for form and content to have a cohesion. One thing has to feed the other, otherwise it falls apart. They have to be in chorus, otherwise it falls flat.

DN: On some level, that’s the most fundamental art concern: the cohesion of form and content. On the one hand, that seems obvious, and on the other hand, it’s the thing that evades so many artists. I feel like it’s what you actually learn in art school, how to put those things together, how they inform each other and have to be working in tandem. In your work it comes back to the fact that the process matters; it’s part of what charges the work.

SG: The process is not just purely functional. It’s fairly politicized and it comes out of an ethos. Coming back to the younger movement…I think that might be the difference; a lot of people working in that way are doing it for the finished image, and not really putting together all the other parts.

Sayre Gomez, Progress Maker, 2023; Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and Xavier Hufkens. Photo: Morgan Waltz.

DN: Can we come back to something more fundamental? I’m curious about wanting to be an artist and deciding to go to art school.

SG: I always wanted to go to art school from the time I was a pretty little kid. I grew up going to the Art Institute, to the museum. It was pretty obvious really early that I was into art, and so my mom would take me there. When I was in high school, I did some of the early college summer camp programs and I got a little scholarship there. It was sort of assumed, “You’re definitely gonna go there.” I didn’t even apply anywhere else; I just knew I was gonna go, so I did.

I moved to Arkansas when I was 14 and the second I left, I just knew I was going to move back to Chicago. I had a real love affair with wanting to be there.

DN: We talked about how you arrived at your practice, your voice and process. But more broadly, I’m curious for artists, what do you think art should do? How do you decide this is a thing that has value in the world, that has value for me?

SG: It’s one of those things I choose not to think about too much. I used to think art had to have a function, like art should change people’s lives. Now I think that’s a tall order… I just don’t know if that’s art’s job, necessarily. I think art’s job is to be interesting. It’s like a catwalk almost, because on one side, it can just perilously fall into meaningless object hoarding. The relationship of art to money is so problematic. For millennia, that’s always been the case. That aspect of art’s status is very interesting, because what it purports to be and who’s hoarding it are oftentimes so at odds. To put it best, it’s like a marriage that’s fucking rocky.

“I used to think art had to have a function, like art should change people’s lives. Now I think that’s a tall order… I just don’t know if that’s art’s job, necessarily. I think art’s job is to be interesting.”

DN: It’s always been patronage, and so it’s always been strange bedfellows.

SG: But the patronage model isn’t quite the same anymore. Artists are more like small businesses…I mean, my studio is run, not like a gallery per se, but it has a structure.

DN: But even as you, or our peers, shift tiers, ascending and becoming wealthy people themselves, I think there’s still a representation of counterculture or freedom and expression that artists hold. I’m working on an exhibition with a private collection and there’s all this abstraction and the conversation is so much about the way that artwork allows for the inner life to come through…the artist’s hand, their psyche. I think we still want artists to be free, to be expressive. But I don’t know if that applies to your work…

SG: I don’t know what that means, per se…does expression begin and end at my interior feelings laid bare for all to see? Or is expression my thoughts and musings on post-industrial American sort-of collapse? I think my work is actually pretty expressive.

I don’t know if it’s quotationally expressive, but I’m expressing my interest and my thoughts and my feelings. I think my work can be incredibly sad. You said it was really dark, and I think that’s pretty expressive. I guess that’s the humanistic impulse that I’ve been trying to foster a little bit more. I’m in therapy, you know what I mean? So this is all stuff I’m trying to unpack in my own life, too.

I just think the idea of brushstrokes connoting expression is laughable.

DN: It’s certainly an old school idea…

SG: I wrote something, maybe a decade or more ago, and I talked about crying. One of the things that people always tout about movies is when it brings them to tears. That’s the pinnacle of the effectiveness of a film or something. It worked, it did what it’s supposed to do—it overwhelmed you emotionally and you had no choice but to cry. But it’s an interesting and absurd idea because it’s scientific; people know how to make you cry. If it’s the right music with the right images, you will cry, almost for sure.

It’s always presented as the telltale sign, it’s the criteria of effectiveness or of an artwork’s prowess. I think it’s pretty off base. I’ve never walked into a room of paintings and cried. It’s never happened and it never will happen. But I’ve cried during a fucking Jiffy Lube commercial.

DN: So many people have an apocryphal story about a painting that made them cry.

SG: It’s a black square. You didn’t.

DN: But your work now does have this more personal, darker sensibility that we discussed. I don’t know, I find it moving in ways that are sad, but also I’m often excited to see how you’re framing the world, or showing L.A., or our lives. It has always felt poignant for me.

SG: In the context of modern art and that lineage and history, art doesn’t make me cry. What’s emotional is that it’s really groundbreaking and it took a lot of courage to come to that conclusion. But it’s not tears. Like a Caspar David Friedrich painting—I think they’re beautifully done, but I would never cry looking at one. I would never cry looking over a cliff in real life.

Diana Nawi

Diana Nawi is Curator of Special Projects at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.