Jem Perucchini’s Sospiro opens at David Zwirner Tribeca
The Italian artist's first American exhibition explores the sigh as a passage between inner self and external world, with paintings rendered in warm ochres and vibrant hues that arrest and mesmerise.
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Jem Perucchini makes her American debut with Sospiro at David Zwirner’s Tribeca gallery, a meditation on the fleeting gesture that carries more weight than its brevity suggests. The title takes its name from a 2026 painting on view and draws from the Italian word for sigh, a breath that moves between pause and release, audible and invisible, essential and transient.
The exhibition unfolds as a study in interiority. Perucchini’s portraits emerge from grounds of saturated colour, burnt ochre, deep green, luminous orange, the figures rendered with a spare, contemplative intensity. The Whistler presents a face suffused in tonality, while A Nocturnal Journey carries the warmth of amber light. Each canvas conducts a quiet conversation between what dwells within and what breaks through into the world, between the soul and its expression in bodily form.
The paintings occupy the pristine white walls of the gallery with considerable presence, their rich grounds and carefully modulated figuration demanding sustained looking. Perucchini’s work inhabits that tender space between restraint and emotion, between the gesture withheld and the gesture finally made. The sigh, after all, may signal exhaustion or relief, resignation or acceptance; its meaning lives in the space between intention and utterance.
Sospiro remains on view at David Zwirner Tribeca through extended hours this evening and Friday, 13 November, during Art Week NYC.
Imagery courtesy of David Zwirner (@davidzwirner).
