Jem Perucchini: the pause before the next move

A sigh is brief, but it can change the space between two people. Sospiro, Italian for sigh, gives Jem Perucchini's New York exhibition its title and a useful starting point. These paintings leave room for a feeling before it becomes a clear story. A figure looks away; an encounter remains suspended; a familiar myth returns without settling into illustration.

Opened November 6 at David Zwirner's Tribeca space, the exhibition brings together new paintings and works on paper. The gallery identifies it as Perucchini's first exhibition in the United States, following solo presentations in Turin and Seville. Born in Ethiopia in 1995 and raised in Italy, he studied at Milan's Brera academy and continues to work in the city.

The references cross time and geography. The gallery's account connects his work to early Italian Renaissance painting, African wax-print textiles, Ethiopian church frescoes and Greek mythology. Those sources do not resolve into a single historical setting. They give the imagined scenes different ways to hold a gesture, a pattern or a figure's distance from another person.

Surface makes that uncertainty physical. Perucchini sprays his canvases with an oil-based emulsion, building the mottled finish described in the exhibition text. The resulting patina complicates the idea of a new painting: an invented scene can appear to have already passed through time. The tension is between the immediacy of the figure and the sense that its world is difficult to reach.

Two large graphite drawings bring the chessboard into focus. Each depicts a solitary player, and the gallery describes this as the first public presentation of Perucchini's drawings. A game proposes order, but its next move depends on what cannot yet be known. That is a useful way into Sospiro as a whole: the paintings make an encounter legible without promising to explain its outcome.

Sospiro
David Zwirner, 52 Walker Street, New York
November 6 to December 19, 2026

Show details and source images: David Zwirner. Further exhibition context. Checked November 9, 2026.

This is a source-based ICA feature, not a report of an in-person visit. Exhibition descriptions are grounded in the linked venue texts; the interpretive framing is ICA America's.