Casey Kaplan

For her solo presentation with Casey Kaplan at Frieze Los Angeles, Jordan Casteel presents a series of new figurative, landscape and still-life paintings that render universal demonstrations of nurture, ever-bountiful and enduring.

Interchangeable as setting and subject, Casteel depicts plant life in layered swaths of color that echo the artist’s gestural portrayals of the body. Fronds and petals overlap like interlocked arms and clasped hands. In Craspedia (2024), the artist studies a landscape of her own making. Passing blooms are made permanent, sprouting from the ground, and leaning in unison.

A family stands engulfed by lush foliage in Naima's Gift (Deon, Kym and Noah) (2023). Kym, a member of the community Casteel created with and for people of color in Upstate New York, aptly named Upstate Color (UPCO), is rendered alongside her partner and young child, embracing within the vibrant garden they built and requested as a site. Its bloom honors the cyclical nature of life, perennially flourishing and impermanent.

In Transit (2023), a caregiver on a NYC subway both leans on and provides support to a child, like stems crisscrossing and carrying the weight of their counterparts. Anonymous and transient, the cropped composition parallels the immediacy of the true-to-scale portrait of a blossoming herb in Holy Basil (2024), composed en plein air. With each intentional brushstroke, Casteel likens the dedication in seeding a garden to the mindful care in cultivating relationships within families and, in turn, to the kinship between artist and sitter.