Vinyl is back, baby — and not just on your turntable. Artist Jac Lahav has transformed the humble album cover into a canvas for memory, nostalgia, and painterly experimentation in their solo exhibition reMastered at Mana Contemporary.
It all began with a bootleg: a Russian pressing of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation featuring Gerhard Richter’s candlelit Kerze on the sleeve. That unexpected crossover between indie rock and blue-chip painting lit a spark. Lahav dove headfirst into their vinyl collection, reimagining iconic records in gouache and acrylic. The results? Hand-painted album covers that function like modern-day icons — flat images that point beyond themselves to entire soundscapes, emotions, and eras.
For Lahav, records are deeply personal. Think Digital Underground in a high school car, Public Enemy blasting on cassette, Elastica scoring teenage rites of passage. But they’re also universal: treasures from a pre-streaming world when liner notes were sacred texts and album covers felt like passports into entire universes.
reMastered pushes this even further by peeking into the record collections of art-world legends. Jackson Pollock’s jazz obsession, Lee Krasner’s carefully curated albums, Georgia O’Keeffe’s playlists, Francis Bacon’s listening habits — all become portals into the private soundtracks of art history. What music filled their studios? Did riffs and rhythms seep into brushstrokes? Lahav treats each painted cover as a cultural clue, bridging music and visual art across time.
Of course, not every sleeve made it past the censors. From Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to The Slits’ Cut, Lahav also revisits albums that provoked scandal, reminding us that art, commerce, and rebellion have always been uneasy bedfellows.
Ultimately, reMastered asks a bigger question: Why paint what mass culture has already produced in perfect, glossy form? Lahav’s answer lies in the irregularities of the hand. Every brushstroke insists on humanity — hesitation, compulsion, vulnerability, joy. In a digital age of endless scrolls and AI image churn, Lahav makes the case that painting still matters because it carries a pulse.
At Mana Contemporary, the exhibition is part gallery show, part record store nostalgia trip — complete with bins to flip through like the good old days. It’s tactile, playful, and a love letter to both analog sound and analog art.
Don’t miss: Jac Lahav, reMastered, on view at Mana Contemporary. Open House October 19, noon to 6pm. And find all available covers here
