Sasha Gordon has built her reputation on paintings of herself, filling canvases with repeated versions of her own face and body in scenes that mix the everyday with the uncanny. Her latest work, Hard Candies (2026), breaks that pattern. Shown in Nocturnal, a group exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong that runs until 14 November, the painting depicts an anonymous friend rather than the artist, caught in a moment of intense concentration over a small glass object held in her hands.

The picture rewards slow looking. The sitter's hair is parted wide down the middle, and the strands are rendered with a precision that feels both tender and severe. Her eyes, auburn and fixed, rest on a paperweight that she holds up as though it were something sacred. Inside the glass, fungal shapes and botanical forms grow like a tiny terrarium, while a white mohair sweater and misty lavender tiles behind her suggest a bathroom thick with steam. The mood is one of withheld access: the viewer can see everything and enter nothing.

Gordon says the change of subject reflects a change in how she feels about her own practice. After years of putting her likeness at the centre of her work, she has begun to feel exposed by that openness, and the new painting lets her explore the same psychological terrain through someone else. The paperweight belonged to her grandmother, and Gordon says it stands in for a loved one or a memory.

The painting's subject is obsession itself, and Gordon is frank about the cost of it. She has spoken about an earlier work dealing with trichotillomania, a condition involving compulsive hair pulling, and says the wide hair part in Hard Candies is a quiet nod to that earlier, more candid phase. Scrutiny, however fierce, cannot prevent loss, just as holding a hard candy gently cannot stop it dissolving. In moving from self-portraiture to portraiture, Gordon has not softened her focus; she has found a new surface for it.