Danny Sobor: April and After

April and After, a presentation featuring a new series of paintings by Danny Sobor (b. 1992, Chicago) will go on view at Kasmin's 514 West 28th Street viewing room from July 15–25 with an accompanying text by writer Justin Kamp.

While Sobor’s oeuvre is centered by a meticulous focus on material concerns, his new series of paintings, April and After, marks an evolution in style, embracing the space between the known and the unknown to further abstract his signature cropped and partially obscured scenes. Raised in Chicago by Polish immigrant parents, Sobor’s practice is firmly rooted within the lineage of Eastern European painters – from Gerhardt Richter, Eberhard Havekost, William Sasnal, and Luc Tuymans to the New Leipzig School.

Sobor draws on the specificity of his regional heritage, utilizing the Russian-owned search engine Yandex, while concurrently blurring the distinction of physical boundaries with imagery excavated from a vast trove of the internet detritus which decentralizes the origin points of its creators through its global accessibility. Working in tension with the authorial intent of the source imagery’s creators, this methodology engages in the conflict surrounding the veracity of images and results in a palimpsest of the present moment. Sobor approaches this digital archive as inherently suspect, referencing source material which may or may not outlast its progeny, vulnerable to erasure, misplacement, or obsoletion.

Rejecting the necessity of a referent to contextualize their existence, Sobor’s paintings insist upon the primacy of their objecthood, becoming, in the words of Jean Baudrillard “nothing more than the sign of [their] own operation.” Baudrillard continues on, that “the true subject of a painter is no longer what he or she paints, but the very fact that he or she paints," which one is tempted to read further as a right to criticism of the media founded upon total devotion. Even so, the anonymity provided by the translation across media and technology does not preclude Sobor’s paintings from achieving a narrative and personal effect, betraying a natural proclivity towards scenes of latent emotional richness.

If, as Susan Sontag asserts in On Photography, “photography is the inventory of mortality,” then the act of painting from these images ossifies them, casting fleeting moments in amber and inserting an uneasiness with the present moment. Held in stasis, these pairs of figures are depicted in isolation or romantic relation to each other. Our own omnipresence as the unseen viewer and third party haunts the scenes, implicitly felt by the unspecified actors within the boundaries of the canvas. As we lean in to closer examine them, the actors can almost feel your breath on the back of their neck.

Vacillating between tender and sterile, these companions are torn from their particularity in time and space while retaining the traces of their interpersonal quality. Evocative of the gaping wound of lovers in a row, one jumps to intuit an expression missed by a distracted confidant, or a grasping towards intimacy tinged by acidic fluorescence, held just out of focus. The flickering relationship between the depicted figures points towards the unstable nature of the source material, allowing the transference across media sever context and identity. In following the gaze of an imagined confidant in thought, the trail runs dry. The forced remove placed between the viewer and the viewed equates to hearing one side of a heated phone call in the other room, as we push past the curtain to step in.

With extended viewing, the eye warms and the paint seems to blush, revealing complexity of color in each layer. These paintings reward sustained attention, responding to changes in light over the course of the day. In our effort to pinpoint their intention, the scenes dodge strict delineation, instead reflecting ourselves back at us and forcing our own memories to play out across these tableaux. This attempt at sincerity is skittish, moving in to be understood before pulling away again abruptly. However, one thing is certain – there is blood here, just beneath the surface.

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About Danny Sobor

Danny Sobor is an American painter based in New York. He received an MFA in Visual Arts and Neuroscience from Brown University in 2015. Sobor has staged solo shows at Vacancy Gallery, Shanghai (2025) and Fortnight Gallery, New York (2024), and was featured in Kasmin's annual benefit for Artistic Noise in 2024 and 2025. His work is held by the X Museum in Beijing and the Beth DeWoody collection, and will be featured in a forthcoming group exhibitions at Adler Beatty, New York, curated by Lily Mortimer, and Chilli Gallery, London.