Jordan Casteel’s “Winter Sun” in Paris: Light, Grief and New Motherhood in Her First Show in France

There is a particular kind of light in January — low, pale, more silver than gold — that makes everything look both closer and further away. Jordan Casteel has built an entire exhibition around it. Jordan Casteel: Winter Sun at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais opens on 19 October 2026 and runs until 23 December. It is the American painter’s first exhibition in France and, the gallery says, her most significant presentation in Europe so far.

Jordan Casteel’s Winter Sun: a title with two meanings

Say the title aloud and it splits in two: winter sun, winter son. The paintings were made in the first half of 2026, in the period after the birth of Casteel’s son, and the exhibition text frames them around a cluster of themes that rarely sit comfortably together in contemporary painting — dormancy and renewal, love and loss, grief, mortality and the daily labour of maternal care. The palette follows suit. Instead of the saturated greens, oranges and violets many viewers associate with her earlier canvases, these pictures are cooler and earthier, as if the colour itself had been put through a season.

Casteel builds each canvas around one dominant hue, a device that lets a single colour carry mood the way a key carries a piece of music. In a winter register, that discipline becomes especially telling: restraint rather than abundance does the emotional work.

Who is Jordan Casteel?

Born in 1989 and raised in Denver, Casteel lives and works in New York and has kept a home in the Hudson Valley since 2021. She took her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2014 and rose quickly through a series of institutional solo exhibitions — at the Denver Art Museum, Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and the New Museum in New York, where Within Reach opened in 2020. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2021, has served as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2023, and Phaidon published a monograph on her work in 2025.

Her reputation rests largely on portraiture: large, close, warmly observed paintings of people she meets in her neighbourhood, on the street and on the subway. She works from photographs rather than formal studio sittings, which allows her to encounter subjects in their own surroundings and on their own terms. The press materials point to Alice Neel and Beauford Delaney as touchstones — Neel for the candour of her portraits of neighbours and friends, Delaney for the way colour can become light itself.

Inside the exhibition

Winter Sun moves across genres — portraits, landscapes, flower paintings and still lifes — and several works stand out in the gallery’s description.

• before your time extends Casteel’s long-running Subway Series (2015–present): a family, bodies intertwined, riding a train carriage — the city’s most public space turned into a scene of tenderness.
• Weighted (For Clyde) is a self-portrait of the artist holding her newborn, with both faces cropped out of the frame. It is a striking decision for a portraitist: the subject is not identity but the physical fact of holding.
• Memorial (For John) returns to a motif she first painted in 2017 — a floral tribute left on a Harlem street — and turns a stranger’s act of mourning into a meditation on how grief is made public.
• Generations and Last Blooms carry the cycle of growth and decline into family and garden.

The flower paintings, partly made in her Hudson Valley garden, are tightly cropped so that petals and stems press against the edges of the canvas. The exhibition text sets painting, mothering and gardening side by side as parallel forms of cultivation — three kinds of care, each slow, each seasonal, each dependent on attention.

Why Paris, why now

Thaddaeus Ropac’s Marais gallery on Rue Debelleyme sits at the heart of the city’s most concentrated gallery district, a short walk from the Musée Picasso, and the autumn season is when Paris draws its largest international art audience. The accompanying catalogue includes an essay by Amandine Nana, a curator at the Palais de Tokyo — a sign that the presentation is aimed at a French institutional audience as much as at the market.

For European viewers who have only seen Casteel in reproduction, this is the first serious chance to stand in front of the paintings. Scale matters with her work: the figures are often life-size or larger, and the flat, carefully modulated colour fields read very differently in a room than on a screen.

What painters and collectors should look for

• For painters: how a single dominant colour organises a canvas, and how a deliberately muted palette can still feel luminous.
• For portraitists: the cropped faces in Weighted (For Clyde) — a lesson in how much a portrait can say through hands, weight and posture alone.
• For collectors: a turning point in subject matter, from the community portraits that made her name to a more personal, seasonal and domestic body of work.

Visiting information

Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, 7 Rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris. 19 October – 23 December 2026; opening Monday 19 October, 6–8pm. Tuesday–Saturday 10am–7pm. Phone +33 1 42 72 99 00. Read the official exhibition page, see our Jordan Casteel: Winter Sun listing for full contacts, and browse Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries for more shows in Paris, London, Istanbul and beyond.