Dora Jeridi: A Burnt Child Loves the Fire
10 September - 17 October 2026
Marianne Boesky Gallery
507 West 24th Street

Boesky Gallery is pleased to present A Burnt Child Loves the Fire, an exhibition of new paintings by Paris-born, New York-based artist Dora Jeridi (b. 1988). For her debut exhibition with the gallery, Jeridi––who originally trained as a political historian but turned to painting out of a desire for a mode of expression she never found in academic discourse––draws on memory, art-historical references, and cultural heritage to examine the intricacies and anxieties of human relationships.

When Jeridi, born and raised in France, moved to New York in 2024, she began examining the French cultural assumptions she had long taken for granted. Trained as an academic historian, Jeridi sought understanding in the same place any good researcher would: the archives. She found herself particularly intrigued while examining a host of vintage and historic garments—primarily from Dior’s Galliano era—in the archives of the iconic French fashion house. She found that the luxurious textiles and intricate designs took on a certain significance that spoke to a particular French opulence: the grandiosity of the Bourbon monarchs, the drama of Baroque painting, the elegance of Parisian runways.

Throughout her explosive, large-scale paintings, Jeridi composes theatrical settings for playful examinations of the drama and tragedy of the human experience. With the new work in A Burnt Child Loves the Fire, Jeridi conjures refined, domestic interiors loosely inspired by her grandmother’s Parisian home, furnished with plush leather sofas, elegant wooden dining sets, and ornately framed oil portraits. Disrupting any sense of warm domesticity, the artist collapses her meticulous scenes with discordant interventions such as Picasso’s infamous screaming Guernica (1937) horse head and broad tracts of crosshatching and tar-like black.

A Burnt Child Loves the Fire takes its from Oscar Wilde’s subversion of a 14th-century proverb, in which “the burnt child dreads the fire.” If Jeridi’s infinite drapery speaks to a certain elegance and sophistication, the overlying patches of darkness speak to the propulsive, seductive forces of darkness and tragedy that sustain the artist’s practice. 

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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download high-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of the exhibition, with the credit line “copyright of the artist and courtesy of Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen”