Gagosian is pleased to announce Titus Kaphar’s first exhibition in Paris, The Fire This Time, opening at the rue de Ponthieu gallery on January 29, 2026. The exhibition features new paintings and hand-carved wood sculptures that extend the artist’s engagement with how history and representation impact collective memory

The exhibition title refers to James Baldwin’s civil-rights-era masterpiece, The Fire Next Time (1963), which charts the author’s struggle with—and ultimate rejection of—the racial politics of America. In relocating to Paris, Baldwin joined a community of American expatriate artists and thinkers, including Miles Davis, Nina Simone, and Richard Wright—figures who refused what Baldwin called “the American madness.” Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time (2017) carries those concerns into contemporary America, more than fifty years later.

Kaphar’s new paintings and sculptures reflect on the symbolic role of the American presidency at a moment when that “madness” is again at center stage. As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—alongside national “No Kings” protests—Kaphar offers a form of homage and redress by foregrounding faces and voices that have long existed in the shadows of power.