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Large Fish with Escort
Opens the painting on AVAM’s auction page (Givebutter). See the current bid there. 100% supports the American Visionary Art Museum.
The paper
Take a sheet. Make it flaunt.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) made portraits with no faces. A pile of wrapped candy stood in for a body. A stack of paper sat on the floor, and visitors were invited to take a sheet home. The work shrank as people carried it away, and the museum refilled it. In 2024–25 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington held Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, the largest showing of his work in DC in thirty years.
Matt went, took sheets from the stacks, and painted on them. One stack was black paper, “Untitled” (Party Platform – 1980–1992). On a black sheet like these he painted this fish: a crown, a target eye, a red grin full of teeth, and a little diver tagging along below, the “escort.”
It is not his first time. Matt has painted on Gonzalez-Torres paper since 2019, when he used sheets from a Gonzalez-Torres installation at the National Gallery of Art in his first live-streamed painting session. The Always to Return sheets became his third series: Truly Alone, Hand Up, Innocents, Liberation Day, State of the Union, most of them now with collectors. This fish came out of the studio in August 2026.
Why it belongs in Flaunt
A portrait with no face, given one
Flaunt: When Appearance Speaks is AVAM’s 31st big themed show: about 100 works on what we say with how we look. The gala is a full-on celebration of looks, made with drag artists, the art form where appearance is the whole message.
Gonzalez-Torres came at the same question from the other side. He was a gay, Cuban-born artist who lost his partner, Ross Laycock, to AIDS in 1991, and he died of AIDS-related illness in 1996. In his portraits the person is fully there, but his appearance is gone: “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is a pile of candy that starts at about 175 pounds, roughly a man’s ideal body weight, and gets smaller as visitors take a piece.
Gonzalez-Torres made his stack disappear one sheet at a time. Matt made one sheet flaunt.
Matt’s fish answers that quiet absence with the loudest appearance he has: a crown, a stare, a mouth full of teeth. It is a small piece of a great queer artist’s work, carried home and dressed up for the party.
About the exhibition: avam.org/exhibitions/flaunt (October 10, 2026 – September 5, 2027). About Always to Return: Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.
The escort
A diver, twenty-two years later
Look under the fish’s belly: a tiny diver in goggles, swimming along with an arrow. In his first AVAM show, the 2004 water show Holy H2O, one of his two paintings was a scuba diver too. So the fish arrives back at the museum with an old friend as its escort.
The fish, out in the world
Thirty years of Sesow fish
The fish is one of Matt’s signature icons, with the bull, the dog and the bunny: crowned, target-eyed, sharp-toothed and watching. Hundreds have gone to collectors around the world. A few of the places it has turned up:
In collectors’ homes
Over the fireplace, above the bed, in the hallway light, in North Carolina, Delaware, Washington and beyond. Matt’s paintings also made the cover of Starfish, the 2003 EP by DC band Exit Clov.
About the artist
Matt Sesow
Matt Sesow is a Washington, DC painter. He lost his dominant hand to an airplane propeller at age eight, taught himself to paint, and has painted nearly every day since 1994. He has sold more than 17,000 original paintings directly to collectors in over 40 countries, and in 2013 the United Nations put his painting Dive Bomb on a stamp.
Take the fish home. Help AVAM.
Bids from $150 · closes Friday, November 13, 10 PM ET · pickup at the museum, Baltimore.
Place your bid →See the whole auction · Dana Ellyn’s piece: “Making Friends”