Leslie Kean is something of an anomaly: a journalist on a paranormal beat. For her best-selling book about the hereafter, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (2017), her interview subjects included doctors, children who remember past lives, and survivors of near-death experiences. She is also the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (2011), and in the pages of The New York Times she has helped to uncloak the US government’s “unidentified aerial phenomenon” program. Her critics argue that she snubs rational explanations of strange sightings, such as fast-moving lights and saucers captured on camera by the navy, in order to keep speculation alive. She claims to have touched an ectoplasmic hand.

Since 2025 Kean has taken a series of esoteric selfies that include, according to a press release from Gagosian, “evidence of unexplainable effects” and “enigmatic visual elements” in the form of blurs and blobs. These latter-day spirit photographs are the basis of “GHOSTS,” an exhibition of work by Kean’s niece, the painter Eliza Douglas, at one of Gagosian’s smaller venues in Manhattan. Just as it is unclear how seriously Kean takes her spectral “evidence,” Douglas’s eight untitled paintings—consisting of the pale aura of a woman’s face and hair swimming in gold, green, and magenta—drift between sincere self-expression and cynicism.

The canvases are something like reheated goods. Although this is her first exhibition at the mega-gallery and her first solo show in New York, Douglas didn’t exactly make new work for the occasion. Instead she used a UV printer (a flatbed device that can spray ink on curved or textured surfaces) to superimpose distorted versions of her aunt’s photographs onto paintings that she had previously exhibited but that didn’t sell. Douglas sees Kean’s selfies not as proof of anything but as scrims, and she allows each of the original compositions to bleed through its chaotic new coat. An image of her aunt in dark peacock tones (one of the more complete cover-ups) has been freshly painted with serif text spelling the names of art capitals: London, Paris, New York. It can be difficult to delaminate the layers of smooth ink, feathered paint, and rough brushwork, although, as with Jackson Pollock’s piled-on skeins, the order of operations seems like a rare clue to the artist’s intent.

In this respect the brushstroke is significant. For centuries painters smoothed out or minimized the marks that would ruin their illusions. For the modernists, however, brushstrokes (or drips, or any other means of getting paint onto the canvas) signaled immediacy and emotional truth. In the 1980s Roy Lichtenstein parodied this ethos of self-expression with freestanding sculptures of brushstrokes themselves. One of Douglas’s more recognizable reworked paintings, first exhibited in 2016, consists of two hands at the ends of crooked striped sleeves that resemble cartoon brushstrokes. Their thick lines form ridges beneath Kean’s supernatural selfie. Is this a case of cold technical method overtaking the hot motion of the artist’s hand? It’s not so simple: parts of the overprinting appear chunky, too, as if the ink is boosted by gobs of white primer; other stretches appear to have been repainted on top of the UV print.

Douglas’s hints of an artist’s touch (she’s known to outsource production to China, and there’s no reason to think she applied the paint herself) nod to an idea of sincerity that she ultimately withholds. These are anti-paintings. In fact, the final products are pretty unpleasant. Rough patches and peaks in the paint sometimes break the membrane of the superimposed images, allowing white underpainting to show through. The effect is that of a peeling sunburn, cruddy and sordid. Maybe Douglas means to flip a punkish middle finger at her new patrons. Through her work with the luxury fashion label Balenciaga and with the German artist Anne Imhof, known for doomy performance art, she has come to be identified with slacker culture and youthful rebellion.

Sincerity has long been a live question for artists, but those working after the advent of the Internet (not to say generative AI) have had an especially hard time conveying something original, earnest, and true. How can you tell if they’re putting you on? Douglas’s work seems to prove that you can’t. Her ghostlike paintings are afterimages of a time when artists unselfconsciously attempted to depict the human soul. These spirit pictures induce something short of revelation: ambivalence.