I first encountered Sombreuil’s work about 10 years ago—the coolest woman I had met in New York was wearing a pair of Come Tees screen-printed jeans, the legs bleached from the hip down, covered with bold drawings of red and blue faces and text reading, “The whole universe is completely insane. Go into your little hideaway.” Sombreuil’s figures, style and lettering that pull from a wealth of sources, yet all her own, became unmistakable to me and many other people who started collecting her garments. Those jeans, along with almost fifty other Come Tees pieces both recent and archival, now hang on the wall at Jeffrey Deitch, providing not only an in-depth look at Sombreuil’s screen-printing practice but a new setting and perspective to her artmaking. In a short video accompanying the exhibition, Sombreuil states that this show is a sort of “initiation for [her] painting practice,” as she resumed oil painting this past year. Rendered in her distinctive visual lexicon informed by punk, graffiti and music culture, her paintings combine figures with text, full of color and bold yet intimate.

Sonya Sombreuil, Come Tees: “Turn Magic Wheel”
Jeffrey Deitch
925 N Orange Drive, Los Angeles 90038
On view through January 13, 2024