Los Angeles-based artist Sayre Gomez (b. 1982, Chicago, IL) employs a wide range of techniques, including trompe l’oeil, airbrushing, and stenciling, in his semi-fictionalized photorealistic paintings. Drawing inspiration from the urban landscape of Los Angeles, Gomez uses an amalgamation of documentary photography and sourced imagery to present astute observations of daily life and examine contemporary visual culture. His ongoing body of work explores themes such as the beauty of nature, the passage of time, urban decay, modern technology, and commercial nostalgia. Gomez’s hyperreal paintings blur the line between authenticity and simulation: a seemingly realistic cityscape may, in fact, be a reconstructed image. In doing so, his paintings highlight the increasingly tenuous boundary between our everyday physical environment and a digital culture that relentlessly manipulates, enhances, and reinterprets images — raising questions about how we perceive and understand the world.

Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Hellooooo, Daido Moriyama / Sayre Gomez, Taka Ishii, Tokyo, Japan (2025); Sayre Gomez | Jack Goldstein, The Ranch, Montauk, NY (2024); Heaven ‘N’ Earth, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium (2024); Landscapes, Nagel Draxler, Cologne, Germany (2023); Enterprise, Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China (2022); Renaissance Collection, Fonazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2022); and Halloween City, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art Since 1968 at the MoCA, Los Angeles; The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970 – Present at the MCA, Chicago; The Life of Things at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands; Fresh Window: The Art of Display and Display Art at Museum Tinguely, Basel Switzerland. Boothill Express, M. LeBlanc, Chicago, IL (2024); The Living End: Painting and other Technologies, 1970-Present, MCA, Chicago, IL (2024); 4 x 4, Karma, New York, NY (2024); Come One, Come All, Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL (2024); Come As You Are, Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL (2022); and 1988, Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL (2020).

Gomez’s works are held in the permanent collections of LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; mumok, Vienna, Austria; ICA, Miami, FL; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turino, Italy; Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal, Canada; and The Rubell Museum, Miami, FL. Gomez holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.