DOCUMENT

DOCUMENT Chicago is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Kazuhito Tanaka, opening on Friday, June 12. In Picture(s), Tanaka continues his exploration of the convergence of painting and photography across over a dozen mixed media works: equally formed by abstract paintings and collages made of torn chromogenic photographs, the works in the exhibition suggest a series of dialogues from their two distinct materialities. On a first level and despite the differences in media, both portions of the plane are arranged through layering, variations of size and color, as well as flat and bulky applications. At this level, an initial conversation on resemblance/difference, followed by color, is established. Beyond material properties, the juxtaposition of two media with densely packed histories maintains a dialogue that is relevant to this day, yet it does so free of its characteristic tensions. Additionally, each work offers a commentary on the latency of an image, on its potential to reveal itself to viewers through different registers of opacity. Are the vivid photographic effects of chromogenic prints the inspiration behind the paintings? Or, quite the contrary, are the collages attempting to follow and mimic the paintings’ unique rhythm? In this relationship of equals, the answer could simply be “both.” Kazuhito Tanaka (b. 1973, Saitama, Japan) lives and works between Kyoto and Fukuoka, Japan. He graduated from Meiji University in Tokyo in 1996 and from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions include KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, Tokyo, Japan (2025); DOCUMENT, Lisbon, Portugal (2024); Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria (2023); Gallery PARC, Kyoto, Japan (2023); KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, Tokyo, Japan (2022); Paris London Hong Kong, Chicago, IL (2022); Gravity and Light, soda, Kyoto (2020), Self-Dual, Gallery PARC, Kyoto (2019), Trans / Real -The potential of Intangible Art vol.7 Kazuhito Tanaka, gallery M, Tokyo (2017), pLastic_fLowers, Maki Fine Arts, Tokyo (2015). In parallel to his artistic practice, Tanaka works as an independent curator and is the director of soda, an artist-run space in Kyoto. His recent curatorial projects include DREAMING CHIMERA, soda + HAGIWARA PROJECTS, Tokyo, Japan (2024); Navid Nuur -MONO NO AWARE NESS-, soda, Kyoto, Japan (2023); 50 seconds, soda, Kyoto, Japan (2022); and NEW INTIMACIES -WILD WILD WEST-, Gallery PARC, Kyoto, Japan.

DOCUMENT is delighted to present Nocturne, Dabin Ahn’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opening on Friday, March 27. Ahn creates paintings that occupy the space between image and object. Working from a vocabulary of ceramic vessels, stones, candles, and personal effects—subjects he understands as stand-ins for the self—he builds meticulously rendered scenes that draw on 20th-century painting history and Joseon dynasty porcelain traditions. He constructs his own frames and panels, shaping and painting over the canvas edge to extend each composition into physical space. The Four Seasons introduces video into Ahn’s practice for the first time. This painting incorporates a functioning screen, showing fragments of videos recorded by the artist over three years of travel and daily life: cityscapes, birds in flight, fireworks, the moon. The footage plays forward then loops backward in an infinite cycle. Made in a period of personal loss, the work turns on the question of what it means to hold time, to move through it in both directions at once, to find in its passage something other than finality. The motif of time is also present in the freestanding wood work Ephemeral (Sculpture), which presents a pair of butterflies and a candle painted on small, fractured stones that rest on brass rods, recalling museum displays of archeological fragments and small artifacts. Night is the dominant atmosphere of the exhibition: crescent moons, darkened treelines, lone lit windows, sky caught between last light and full dark. Mother of pearl inlay recurs throughout as a material gesture, moons that glow from within the painted surface. Torso (Nocturne) takes the silhouette of an armless, headless ancient sculpture of Venus, filling it with red sky giving way to a deep blue, starry night, and shows a small house with lit windows just visible through the trees. In Homesick, a diagonal slash of charred wood bark divides the picture plane: a crescent moon on one side, a dark apartment building with a single glowing window on the other. Small paintings like Nocturne and Nocturne II also share this quality of suspended time, landscapes caught at the precise moment between one condition and the next. Against this nocturnal backdrop, the candle, threaded through broken stone fragments on brass rods, its flame bisected yet burning, becomes the exhibition’s central figure. Dabin Ahn (b. 1988, Seoul, Korea) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Ahn received a BFA and MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include Golden Days, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2026); Good Things Take Time, Harper’s, New York (2024); Silent Whisper, 1969 Gallery, New York (2024); Staged, OCHI, Los Angeles (2023); and One-Off, Shatto Gallery, Los Angeles (2022). Selected group exhibitions include I Go To Seek A Great Perhaps, Make Room, Los Angeles (2024); 36 Paintings, Harper’s, East Hampton (2024) and Storage Wars, The Hole, Los Angeles (2023). His work is held in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA and X Museum, Beijing, China.

DOCUMENT Chicago is delighted to present a two-person exhibition of photographs by Jimmy DeSana and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Opening on January 9, the exhibition will remain on view through March 21, 2026. This intergenerational dialogue between the work of Jimmy DeSana and Paul Mpagi Sepuya unfolds as a set of carefully matched pairings. Both artists use photography to engage with queer bodies and the politics of representation, implicating the viewer as much as any figure who appears in the frame. Closely associated with New York City’s No Wave and downtown art scenes in the late 1970s and employing a rich array of photographic processes, DeSana drew on Surrealism in presenting bodies in confusing entanglement with everyday objects as well as one another. Anticipating the sexual anxieties of the imminent AIDS crisis, he infused queer erotics with equal parts absurdity and dread. Beginning his career in the mid-2000s, Sepuya’s work comes from his intimate involvement and collaboration with queer communities on both U.S. coasts. The desiring gaze can only take in Sepuya’s bodies via fragmentation, mirroring or the clever reproduction of his previous photographs; effects meticulously produced by Sepuya in the studio rather than by any digital manipulation. Side by side, DeSana and Sepuya remind us that queer aesthetics—much like queer liberation—is a continual process, never far from the lived, corporeal world. Jimmy DeSana (b. 1949, Detroit, MI – d. 1990, New York, NY), a key figure in the New York downtown scene of the 1970s and 80s, created a body of photography that evinces a singular style typified by concealed figures, saturated colors, and surreal mise-en-scène, with subject matter that index the artist’s fascination with American suburbia and queer fetish subculture in equal measure. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2024; Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2023; Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020; and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. DeSana’s work can be found in public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is an artist working in photography whose projects weave together histories and possibilities of portraiture, queer and homoerotic networks of production and collaboration, and the material and conceptual potential of blackness at the heart of the medium. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2023); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2022); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE (2020); CAM St. Louis, MO (2020); and a project for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The artist’s largest monograph to date was published by Aperture in 2024. Works by Sepuya are held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Getty and Guggenheim Museums, LACMA, MoMA, SFMoMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. A survey exhibition will open at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland in February and travel to Sprengel Museum Hannover Germany later in 2026.

DOCUMENT is delighted to present Things change quickly, Luísa Jacinto’s first solo exhibition in the US, opening on November 7, 2025. Jacinto’s artistic practice engages with the protocols of the image, narrative fragmentation, and the tension between excess evidence and obscuration. Working with materials such as rubber membrane, thread, fabric, metal, spray, watercolor, loose pigments, she creates works that establish an increasingly fluid boundary between painting, sculpture and installation. For her inaugural exhibition at DOCUMENT Chicago, Luísa Jacinto modifies the viewer’s perception of light and space through an installation of works from two recent series, Strangers and Work in Space. Together, these bodies of work imbue the gallery with layers of colors, bleeding into one another and influencing their surroundings. Suspended from the ceiling, taking over the middle of the space and set against the surrounding walls, several works from the Strangers series—made up of synthetic rubber membranes, folded and draped over suspended LED tubes that act as both support and light source—sway as visitors approach and walk between them. Work in Space is a series that bridges the gaps between drawing, sculpture and installation: colored threads, arranged in a grid-like composition, run across the gallery wall, as if tracing lines with colored pencils. In Things change quickly, Jacinto’s works form a polychromatic cloud where transparency, layering, and spatial relationships are interdependent of the viewer’s trajectory and attention, constantly shifting. Luísa Jacinto (b. 1984, Lisbon, Portugal) lives and works in Lisbon. Solo exhibitions include My shadow is yours, Parra & Romero, Madrid, Spain (2025); Shining Indifference, MAAT Museum, Lisbon, Portugal (2024); The idea of returning, Galeria Quadrado Azul, Lisbon, Portugal (2022); Stone-Veil, Artworks, Lisbon, Portugal (2019); We had the experience but missed the meaning, galería silvestre, Madrid, Spain (2018); A single day is enough, Museu Carlos Machado, Açores, Portugal (2012). Jacinto’s works have been shown in group exhibitions including: Exhibit C, DOCUMENT, Lisbon, Portugal (2025); It’s the scenery that moves (joint exhibition with Isa Melsheimer), Brotéria, Lisbon, Portugal (2022); Painting, Observation Field, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal (2021); PADA, ASC Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019); Saudade – Unmemorable Place in Time, Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, China and Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal (2018). Her works are in the collections of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal; Fundação EDP, Lisbon, Portugal; Colecção Figueiredo Ribeiro, Portugal; Coleção Arte Contemporanea do Estado, Portugal; Núcleo de Arte Contemporânea da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, among others.

DOCUMENT is delighted to present Artifact Unidentified, a two-person exhibition of recent sculptural works by Kiah Celeste and Gordon Hall. Opening on September 12, the exhibition will remain on view through November 1, 2025. Kiah Celeste’s practice is made up of materials and objects gleaned from urban and industrial contexts, repurposed and combined in sculptures and installations with a post-minimalist bend. Her latest body of work takes on a pared down, yet striking, form: monochromatic pieces of spandex, stretched in poplar frames and installed on the gallery’s walls, playfully incorporate a set of found materials. Extending well beyond the frame to rest on the floor, a large piece of Corian towers within Distent. In Skydrool, a used paint bucket emerges from the center of another frame. Little Apple of Paradise’s frayed bungee cord maintains tension between a cream field of fabric and glass that rests against the floor. Installed bridging a corner, Four Shores’ frames hold plastic cords in tension. Gordon Hall’s sculptures often take the form of pieces of furniture or domestic objects, meticulously reproduced in materials such as cast concrete, wood, or brass. These ambiguously functional works are often employed by performing bodies in Hall’s performances. The works on view in Artifact Unidentified represent a body of work made for the recent exhibition at ICA Boston, Believers: Artists and the Shakers. Taking cues from artifacts in the Shaker Museum’s collection of over 18,000 objects, sometimes joining discrete elements or extending their dimensions, Hall also introduces diligent interventions such as the steel nails fixed to the underside of Rocker or coloring Knob Weight with red pencil. Kiah Celeste (b. 1994, Brooklyn, NY) lives and works in Louisville, KY. In 2016 she received a BFA in photography from the State University of New York at Purchase. Solo exhibitions include Swivel Gallery, New York, NY (2025), DOCUMENT, Lisbon, Portugal (2023), DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL (2022); Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2022); KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, KY (2021); Quappi Projects, Louisville, KY (2021). Group exhibitions include The Carnegie, Covington, KY (2025), Salon 94, New York, NY (2025); Mary M. Torrgler Fine Arts Center, Newport News, VA (2024); Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY (2023); University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, KY (2021); Centre d’Art La Rectoria, Sant Pere De Vilamajor, Barcelona, Spain (2020); and Dadapost, Berlin, Germany (2018). Gordon Hall (b. 1983, Boston, MA) is a sculptor, performance-maker, and writer based in New York. Notable solo exhibitions include The Kitchen, New York, NY (2025); the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2019); the Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2018); and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2018). Hall’s sculptures and performances have been exhibited in group exhibitions at the ICA Boston, Boston, MA (2025); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2022); AIR Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2021); the Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA (2019); The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2018); David Zwirner, New York, NY (2018); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2015). Gordon Hall is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Vassar College. They hold an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Hampshire College.

Victoria Fu’s third solo exhibition with DOCUMENT features a new series of glass artworks that are at once sculptures, paintings, photographs, and prints. Reflecting her ongoing interest in the mediation of perception through technology, these works quote the visual qualities of LCD screens through material and figural representations of iridescence. By layering digitally-derived, lens- and scanner-based imagery onto painted glass and aluminum surfaces, light and color are constructed and refracted in physical ways to evoke—and to riff off of—the idiosyncratic and seductive apparatus of our engagement with the virtual world. The exhibition also includes a video on a monitor, filtered through a glass sculpture, blurring further the boundaries between screen and object. This body of work continues her exploration of how material processes and technological aesthetics intersect to challenge the viewer’s engagement with surface, depth, and temporality.

DOCUMENT is delighted to present All of the Parts, Faheem Majeed’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Opening on April 18, 2025, the exhibition comprises two distinct bodies of newly realized works by the Chicago-based artist, curator, educator, and non-profit administrator.

DOCUMENT Chicago is pleased to present Beginner's Mind, a solo exhibition of 108 paintings on Indian cotton paper, a video, and two maps by Portuguese artist Pedro Vaz (b. Maputo, Mozambique, 1977). Pedro Vaz’s exhibition Beginner’s Mind began long before he conceived it. One could say its origins trace back thirty-five years, to 1991, when artist Rui Calçada Bastos, then twenty years old, set out on a trek through the Indian Himalayas—an experience that later gave rise to the photographic series Paisagem para Desaparecidos II (“Landscape for the Disappeared II”, 2018). But its roots stretch even deeper, to the formation of the mountains themselves over 45 million years ago—peaks near Ladakh that have never ceased to shift and evolve.

The exhibition builds upon and expands the themes of investigation explored in the Exhibit A group exhibition in 2024. Bending the limits of traditional media, repeating patterns and shapes, and referencing the history of art, literature, and cultures are some of the aspects which bring together the artists on view as well as DOCUMENT’s program at large.

DOCUMENT is delighted to present Beyond purpose, Anneke Eussen’s second solo show with the gallery, opening November 1, 2024. Anneke Eussen utilizes the formal principles of Minimalism evoking geometric seriality, yet quietly deploys hidden narratives and secret histories in her work. Her practice revolves around cultivating and repurposing found materials into meticulously detailed and ghostly wall sculptures. Through layering, arrangement, and assembly interventions, Eussen is never manipulating the original shape of the objects and insists on using their original framework. Through overlapping industrial materials such as stone, glass, and metal, Eussen questions the linguistic and political construction of borders. The works emanate the tangibility of human contact, visualizing the sensuous connection between past, present, and future through our relationship with built space.

DOCUMENT is delighted to present Auto Ally, Tromarama’s second solo show with the gallery, opening September 6, 2024. In Auto Ally, Tromarama explores the blurred boundaries between leisure and labor, relaxation and productivity, personal and public spheres, especially within the context of the growing platform economy. The works aim to dissect how digital platforms reshape social behaviors and economic practices, highlighting the tensions and contradictions inherent in this evolving landscape.

Erin Jane Nelson’s new body of work centers around a series of ceramic pinhole cameras and their resulting images. Painted in moody glazes and fashioned into abstractions of mythical creatures and animals, the sculptural cameras employ a centuries-old form of proto-photography as Nelson takes them into the landscape to make images. The show’s title, Undersight, is a colloquial term for the condition of sousveillance, which refers to the art and technology of fostering a more personal, civic form of image production from the lens of “underneath” and an intimate human hand, rather than the “eye in the sky” imaging that monitors everything. By using elements of the material earth and cosmos (clay, light, air particles) to produce photographic impressions of the land, relationships to it, and to each other, Nelson’s cameras do not shoot or capture, but gather and refract. In turn, the exhibition entertains the disobedient belief “that the earth makes itself” and dictates the terms of its own picturing.

DOCUMENT is thrilled to present Infinite Like Night, Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s fourth solo show with the gallery, opening April 12, 2024. The exhibition serves as a site of exploration for Blue Studio, the artist’s newest body of work, shown here for the first time. While continuing his investigation of the studio as a place of portraiture and play, these photographs represent a departure from Sepuya's recent series Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio (2021-2023), currently featured in the artist’s solo show Exposure at Nottingham Contemporary, on view through May 5, 2024.

DOCUMENT is pleased to present the fourth solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty (b. 1978), An Audience, opening February 23, 2024. The installation presents a series of large-scale reliefs, female silhouettes composed from panels of kiln-fired glass fused with photographic images, alongside unframed contact prints, a method of cameraless photography that stages various permutations of the wall-based sculptures through form and color. Spanning the gallery walls to compose a frontal line, the works on view invoke a crowd of inanimate bodies—reminiscent of discarded mannequins, life-sized diagrams transposed from anatomy textbooks, forensic crime scene outlines or autopsy reports—a collection of anonymous and enigmatic figures of display. While the figure remains consistent throughout each work, different objects occupy the body or its surrounding field: magnifying glasses, yardsticks, sardines, an eyeshadow palette reminiscent of color checkers used in studio photography, among other items. Across these disparate markers, each exists as a unit of measurement, of how closely things can be observed or arranged in proximity to our eyes or one another.

DOCUMENT is pleased to present Exhibit A, a group exhibition that brings together, for the first time, works by Elizabeth Atterbury (b. 1982, United States), Anneke Eussen (b. 1978, The Netherlands), Gordon Hall (b. 1983, United States), Erin Jane Nelson (b. 1989, United States), Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, United States), and Pedro Vaz (b. 1977, Mozambique). The exhibition will open on Friday, January 5, and continue through February 17, 2024.