Tristan Unrau at David Kordansky Gallery

Tristan Unrau, Marie (2026). Oil on linen, 40 x 62 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.

Hopes and Fears, painter Tristan Unrau’s debut solo show at David Kordansky Gallery, could easily be mistaken for a group show. As an active refusal to establish his own style, each work is an appropriation—gestural brushwork borrowed from de Kooning, or a scene pulled from a children’s book or a detail from a Breugel painting—fed into AI with prompts to remix the colors, compositions, or techniques. Out of hundreds of results, Unrau chooses the best ones to paint (according to the gallery, no assistants are involved), and the finished works look completely different from one canvas to the next. On paper, this is a practice I might not enjoy; the superficial association of one’s work with a more popular subject has been a market trend lately, a kind of reference-baiting¹ meant to appeal to unadventurous collectors. And painting without a style is like writing without a voice, the kind of soulless endeavor a computer could do on its own, right?

That would be the case if Unrau were a less talented painter. Thankfully this show was executed with a finely attuned eye and a technically gifted hand, intimating an artist’s devotion to the craft and traditions of painting. Highlights include Marie (2026), a still from Jean-Luc Godard’s erotic 1985 film Hail Mary where actor Myriem Roussel lies on her back, an exquisitely potent performance of anxiety that Unrau has rendered in a rich photorealism that softly diffuses into blurry edges. I also like Surrender (2025), the cartoonish illustration of the Empire State Building crawling out of bed, in which the oil paint evokes the ink that might be printed onto a cover of The New Yorker. In the exhibition text, Unrau cites his focus on “the energies of attraction or negation” in a work of art, and certainly some works attract more than others. Chorister (2026) is an adaptation of Félix Vallotton’s Self-Portrait at the Age of Twenty (1885) yassified to a Disney-Pixar smoothness, negating the human, textural details that were the best part of the original. 

Tristan Unrau, Surrender (2025). Oil on linen, 83 x 69 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Jeff McLane.

I think of Unrau’s approach to painting as a parallel to the late poet Raymond Queneau’s approach to language in his 1947 book Exercises in Style: to play in the infinite possibilities of one’s discipline after already having done the reading. Unrau brings to the canvas precisely what AI cannot know, which is the experience of being a viewer or loving a painting. Plainly beautiful to behold, these works reproduce the parts from which he derives pleasure of looking, and they reward the act of going to see them in person. 

Tristan Unrau, Chorister (2026). Oil on linen, 64 x 51 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.

Tristan Unrau’s Hopes and Fears runs from March 19-April 25, 2026 at David Kordansky Gallery.

Janelle Zara is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and the author of Becoming an Architect, a title in Simon & Schuster’s Masters at Work series. You can find her work in a variety of publications focusing on art, design, and architecture, including The Guardian, T Magazine, Artnet, and many others. Her favorite In-N-Out location is the one outside LAX.

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