Claudia Doring Baez: Paris in My Head
April 23 – May 29, 2026
Reception: Thursday, April 23rd from 6:00 – 8:00 PM

Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Claudia Doring Baez. This is the artist's first solo show with the gallery.

Claudia Doring Baez’s paintings are animated by a deep reverence for art history and literature, rendered through a contemporary, expressionistic lens. Engaging in dialogue with artists across centuries, she reinterprets and transforms fragments of existing images to construct a visual language that is distinctly her own. Her visual references span from Germaine Krull and Titian to contemporary photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Peter Hujar to visual stills from the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Pedro Almodóvar.

For this exhibition, the artist drew inspiration from three sources. The first are the photographs of Parisian citylife in the late 1920s and 1930s by Brassaï. The second reference are the film stills from Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpieces, Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut. The last body of work dubbed the Balzac paintings reference masterpieces from Le musée imaginaire de Balzac: les 100 chefs-d'œuvre au cœur de La Comédie humaine by Yves Gagneux, which itself explores the extensive references to painting and art within Balzac's La Comédie humaine. The book reveals how Balzac used masterpieces by artists like Titian, Chardin, and Delacroix to enrich his novels, by presenting a curated selection of 100 key works of art, pairing them with the specific passages from Balzac's work where they appear, creating a "face-to-face" between literature and art history. 

Claudia Doring Baez (b. 1960, Mexico City) received her B.A. from Columbia University, New York (1982) and her M.F.A. in Fine Art from the New York Studio School, New York (2012). Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in galleries such as Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, US; Jane Lombard Gallery, New York; Friedrichs Pontone, New York; Denise Bibro Fine Art Co, New York; La MaMa Galleria, New York; Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York; Galeria Emma Molina, Santa Catarina, Mexico; Pontone Gallery, London; among others. Her work is included in multiple collections, across the country, including the Bronx Museum of Art, New York. The artist lives and works in New York.   

Claudia Doring Baez: Paris in My Head will be on view from April 23 – May 29, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 23rd from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.