‘Still Life’ Is a Window Into Kohshin Finley’s World
A tender dialogue of pottery and painting, now on view at Jeffrey Deitch.
Summary
- Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles is currently presenting Still Life, a new solo exhibition by Kohshin Finley, on view through January 17
- The showcase features Kohshin’s famed greyscale oil portraits in artistic dialogue with his ceramic practice
Kohshin Finley made his name in portraiture. Canvases of close friends and collaborators rendered through richly worked greyscales of oil paint. There’s a disarming power to them, not because his subjects need it, but because they’re captured at ease, as if caught in a conversation with the viewer — two people in the process of figuring one another out.
A few years ago, he rediscovered a love for ceramics. Drawn to its raw quality, Finley began incorporating it into his oeuvre, expanding his artistic world into something more functional, more ancestral. His new solo show, Still Life, brings this dialogue, between pottery and paintings, into clearer focus.
Staged at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, the artist’s hometown, the exhibition sees the artist at his most ambitious: over a dozen of his famed oil portraits, set within custom wooden assemblages by Lucas Raynaud, many housing his earthenware elements.
Each painting depicts a figure significant to both Finley’s personal life and the city’s cultural landscape. Actor Lionel Boyce sits beside designer Chris Gibbs. A tender portrait of Mia Carucci and Mario Ayala hangs high, while artist Diana Yesenia Alvarado can be found perched comfortably atop two shelves.
Across the ceramics and underpaintings, visible only at the right angle, Finley sounds out the emotional tenor of the work in scrawls of poetry, “not always legible but always present,” the artist explained, “like the stories we carry in our bodies.”
“Writing is a way of marking existence,” he said in a recent interview. “For me to have that as a thumbprint foundation to pretty much everything that I do is like: Before anything else, someone was here.”
Still Life is now on view in Los Angeles through January 17, 2026.
Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles
925 N Orange Dr,
Los Angeles, CA 90038
