Jack Pierson
Curtains
March 12–April 18, 2026
Press preview with the artist: Thursday, March 12, 2026, 11 am
Opening reception: Thursday, March 12, 2026, 6–8 pm
Regen Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of drawings and new sculptures by Jack Pierson. The presentation foregrounds Pierson’s longstanding investigation into the formal, philosophical, and ironic qualities of language, and his employment of nostalgia and the search for beauty as thematic vehicles. His eleventh show at the gallery, Curtains brings together work in varying mediums, the exhibition as a whole mirroring the timelessness and contemporaneity present in each individual work.
The exhibition presents a selection of Pierson’s signature word sculptures created from vintage signage salvaged by the artist and arranged in sentiments and phrases likewise gathered throughout his life. These works operate poetically, allowing for subjective or shared poignance, from the playful vernacular of HOMOS ONLY (2025) to the sincerely existential PURE BEING (2025). Encapsulated within the materiality of the found letters is an open-ended sense of memory and wistfulness.
Those impressions can similarly be felt throughout a suite of seventy works on paper originally published in a book produced on the occasion of Regen Projects’s first exhibition with Pierson in 1994. Through a language of dreams and regrets, the drawings evoke hope and loneliness, as one reads, “Maybe never.” Nostalgia for past possibilities surfaces throughout Pierson’s oeuvre, arriving in this exhibition through the drawings that reference his time in New York in the 1990s, and as the romance and tragedy of old Hollywood lore suggested by images of palm trees, roses, and stars adhered to the gallery walls.
For nearly four decades, Pierson has utilized photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture to examine themes of memory, desire, longing, absence, despair, and faded glamour. Pierson transforms ordinary objects and language into conduits of complex emotion, demonstrating his singular ability to elicit the beautiful and profound from the quotidian. In the words of art critic Liz Kotz: “Pierson’s work seems motivated by this swing from deprivation to excess, aiming for transcendent moments of beauty and grace that might be found in a smoky bar or alongside a desert road.” (Jack Pierson: Desire/Despair, 2006)
Elliott Templeton Fine Arts—Jack Pierson’s self-run New York gallery space—makes its Los Angeles debut alongside the artist’s solo exhibition with a special presentation of works by Joseph Geagan, David Johansen, Frisco Pete, Andrew Weir, Alessandro Raho, and Gus Van Sant. The presentation continues Pierson’s long established curatorial practice and showcases his gallery’s program.
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Jack Pierson (b. 1960, Plymouth, MA) studied at the Massachusetts College of Art, graduating in 1984. He gained early recognition as a member of the Five of Boston group—which included David Armstrong, Philip Lorca di Corca, Nan Goldin, and Mark Morrisroe—that rose to prominence in the late 1980s. He lives and works in New York, NY.
Concurrent with the exhibition at Regen Projects, Jack Pierson: The Miami Years at The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach (2025–26) runs through August 9, 2026. Past solo exhibitions include Museo Ettore Fico, Turin (2021); Aspen Art Museum (2017); Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford (2015); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (2009); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2002); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1995); among others. Pierson’s commission for the Obama Presidential Center will be unveiled at the center’s opening in June 2026.
Work by the artist is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; among others.