Gagosian is bringing something powerful to Paris. On January 29, 2026, the gallery on rue de Ponthieu opens “The Fire This Time”, the very first Paris exhibition by Titus Kaphar. Expect brand-new paintings and hand-carved wooden sculptures that continue what Kaphar does best: shaking up history and asking who gets remembered, and who gets left out.
Kinfolk, Breath Is My Precious Inheritance (Sarah Johnson), 2025 © Titus Kaphar. Photo: Owen Conway. Courtesy Gagosian
The exhibition title nods to “The Fire Next Time”, the iconic civil-rights text by James Baldwin. Baldwin wrote it at a moment of deep political tension in the United States, before leaving the country for Paris, where he joined a community of American artists and thinkers like Miles Davis, Nina Simone, and Richard Wright. They were all searching for distance from what Baldwin famously called “the American madness.” Decades later, that same urgency echoes in “The Fire This Time”, which looks at race and power in contemporary America. Kaphar steps right into this lineage, using art as a way to confront the present through the past.
In these new works, the American presidency becomes a loaded symbol once again. As the United States moves toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, alongside renewed “No Kings” protests, Kaphar turns his attention to the people who lived in the shadows of power. His paintings bring forward faces and stories that history pushed aside, offering both tribute and repair.
Kinfolk, Breath Is My Precious Inheritance (Harry Washington), 2025 © Titus Kaphar Photo: Owen Conway. Courtesy Gagosian
Several canvases revisit the visual language of Kaphar’s well-known Tar and Whitewash series, works that helped define his practice. Using similar techniques, he paints portraits of people who surrounded the first American presidents but were erased from official narratives. Many were enslaved individuals connected to George Washington: domestic workers, Revolutionary War participants, and women who remained enslaved long after his death. By placing them at the center of the composition, Kaphar restores dignity and presence to lives that history tried to forget.
Another group of paintings, titled Drawer, plays with concealment and revelation. Hidden panels are built directly into the canvases, physically representing what archives leave out. When opened, they slowly reveal the story of Celia in Celia: Embers, Bone, and Ash, tracing her journey from exploitation toward freedom. The act of looking becomes active, asking viewers to engage, uncover, and question what they think they know.
Kinfolk, Breath Is My Precious Inheritance (Harry Washington), 2025 © Titus Kaphar Photo: Owen Conway. Courtesy Gagosian
Alongside the paintings, the exhibition features a striking series of hand-carved wooden sculptures. These figures represent friends and family members, the “Saints” who supported Kaphar through his personal life. Influenced by Byzantine art and the Italian Renaissance, and inspired by a formative visit to Florence, each sculpture is carefully burned. The charred surface seals the wood and gives the figures a deep black finish, visually connecting them to Kaphar’s long-standing use of tar, including in works like The Jerome Project.
For Titus Kaphar, fire isn’t destruction. It’s memory, transformation, and truth that refuses to go out. “The Fire This Time” opens in Paris while Kaphar’s work is also on view in the US, including Titus Kaphar: Pictures More Famous than the Truth at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and America 250: Common Threads in Bentonville, Arkansas. Different places, same message: history isn’t finished, and it’s definitely not neutral.
