SAM MCKINNISS: LAW AND ORDER

JEFFREY DEITCH is pleased to announce Law and Order, an exhibition of new paintings by Sam McKinniss, opening at the gallery in New York on September 6, 2025.

September 6 – November 22, 2025

Sam McKinniss could be called a great painter of modern life, if we were to assume that life is still modern. It might be more precise to describe McKinniss as a great painter of contemporary reality. His work examines the mediated image, representing the “reality” people participate in through social media rather than through direct experience.

For Law and Order, McKinniss has gathered an array of source images of law breakers and law enforcers from both fictional films and news photographs. Paintings of A list and D list celebrities are complemented by “location shots” and an image of an escaped Highland bull from his local Kent, Connecticut news blog. A small painting of Alcatraz looms large as a potent American symbol of so-called corrections. The artist has conceived of his exhibition almost as a storyboard. Rather than a conventional press release, we are reproducing McKinniss’s exhibition proposal, written like a film treatment. It provides a vivid presentation of the artist’s concept.

Law and Order is another exhibition for the immediate moment. It arrives fresh on the heels of my last one in January, The Perfect Tense, at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, accompanied as it was by uncontrollable natural disaster. I had intended the pictures, made alone in my studio before the fires started, to explore private grief turned around toward the public domain. In and out of LA, the subsequent months have proved crueler, more violent, and increasingly depressing. American politics drill down on the people with exceptional torque. We’re really in it now and despite my reminiscence there is no turning back.