Kim Gordon

Kim Gordon is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She works across visual art and music, creating paintings, films, and sculptures that merge the two mediums through unconventional materials and processes.

Before Sonic Youth, before the bass guitar, Kim Gordon moved to New York in 1980 to be a visual artist. Forty-plus years later she's still doing both. And the work keeps insisting they were never separate. Her canvases get crumpled, overturned, and flung; her fabric paintings stencil the names of gentrified Los Angeles neighborhoods onto colonial-pattern cloth like protest banners gone sideways; her Airbnb Series traces the female body as sparse pencil on tracing paper, anonymous and dissolving. The newest commissioned film, Jeanetta and Alex (2026), uses two electric guitars to stage a psychosexual argument with post-industrial alienation. The question the work keeps circling: what happens when desire, consumption, and spectatorship collapse into each other. And who gets formatted in the process.