TYLER MITCHELL: GHOST IMAGES

Gagosian is pleased to announce Ghost Images, an exhibition of new works by Tyler Mitchell. This is the gallery’s debut exhibition of Mitchell’s work in New York, and the first since announcing its global representation of the artist.

February 27 – April 5, 2025

Engaging with Southern gothic themes, Mitchell’s new images of seaside leisure (all works 2024) are rooted in his Southern upbringing and explore the psychological space of memory, questioning how photographic tableaux might capture presences that are unseen but deeply felt. They also ask if photographs have the capacity to document memory and express self-determination in the light of history.

This body of work was shot on Jekyll and Cumberland Islands, off the coast of Georgia, when Mitchell returned to his home state in preparation for “Idyllic Space”, his 2024 exhibition at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. The images are set among the beaches, dunes, estuaries, park structures, and ruins of these barrier islands—landscapes of natural beauty that are imprinted with significant human histories. In 1858, the penultimate ship known to have transported enslaved people to the United States landed on Jekyll Island, an event to which the toy boats in “Gulfs Between” allude. Now protected as national seashore, Cumberland Island is the site of a ruined mansion owned by the Carnegie family, who once controlled much of the island.

“Old Fear and Old Joys” and “Buoyancy” are scenes of leisure and evocative compositional suspension. In many of the works, Mitchell veils his subjects. “Ghost Image” features a boy peering out through a shroud-like net, while the figures of “Convivial Conversation” and “The sky is cold but the wing blood hot” are transformed by scrims of sheet and kite that channel the sunlight. The artist further explores layering and ephemerality by innovatively printing photographs onto mirrors, and onto sheets of fabric draped over empty frames. 

Inspired by photographers who were drawn to intangible aspects of space, spirit, and the human form, including Clarence John Laughlin, Frederick Sommer, and Francesca Woodman, Mitchell employs superimposition, multiple exposures, and fragmented composition to assert material presence while picturing apparitions of the past.