Sayre Gomez (b. 1982, Chicago) creates paintings and sculptures whose photorealistic virtuosity and scrupulous attention to detail reveal an unvarnished Los Angeles rarely seen in popular imagery. In their deep attunement to the incongruities and disparities visible on the streets of Los Angeles, Gomez’s immersive landscapes serve as local stand-ins for broader American realities. Abandoned cars, banal signage, neglected architecture, and other oft-overlooked corners become, through the artist’s “paint what you know” approach, vivid responses to class, race, and disenfranchisement. Even as they recall the hyperrealism of trompe l’oeil painting, his images resist strictly documentary readings. Originating in photographic sources that the artist crops, frames, and collages into composites, Gomez’s semi-fictional sites blur distinctions between the real and fabricated—appropriately in keeping with L.A.’s economies of fantasy. Both conceptually and materially, the artist’s practice—which also includes installation and video works—engages in direct dialogue with the enmeshed histories and attendant techniques of photography and painting. Subjects both minor and major—the minutiae of a trash heap and a sublime sky at dusk—are rendered to equally resonant effect through a rigorous process that includes photographing, digital drawing, projecting, stenciling, and ultimately, airbrushing. While the painted outcomes are, most immediately, powerful evocations of the contradictions of decline, so too are they records of their own time-intensive processes of becoming. 

Gomez will be the subject of a 2026 solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico. He has also presented solo exhibitions at Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, China (2022–2023) and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy (2022). Notable group exhibitions include The Life of Things, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2025); Fresh Window, Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2024–2025); The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2024–2025); Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2024–2025); Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog), The Broad, Los Angeles, CA (2024); PRESENT ’23: Building the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, OH  (2023); NGV Triennial 2023, NGV International, Melbourne, Australia (2023–2024); Changes, mumok, Vienna, Austria (2022–2023); and Dark Light: Realism in the Age of Post-Truths, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon (2022).