Sasha Gordon's Hard Candies (2026) is a portrait of a green woman admiring a translucent paperweight. Gordon builds her paintings from thin, translucent layers of oil, so the skin glows. She graduated from RISD in 2020. Her work is now in The Broad’s collection, and David Zwirner began co-representing her in 2024. Hard Candies hangs in Nocturnal at Zwirner Hong Kong through November 14.

Gordon often paints herself, using her body as what Zwirner calls "a kind of unorthodox avatar." Hard Candies is a rare exception: the sitter is someone else, peering into a crystal paperweight that belonged to Gordon's grandmother: a glass egg holding a tiny garden of red caps, orange toadstools, and a teal flower. It's an object inside a painting about loving an object.

Look closely, and she's doing exactly what you're doing right now.