In the days leading up to her first show at the David Zwirner gallery, the artist Sasha Gordon was painting 17 hours at a clip, starting late in the afternoon and continuing until 11 the next morning. She was relentless. When she’d finish one section of a painting, she’d take a quick nap to clean her mind, then go at it again. “When I am painting,” Gordon said, “I usually get fast toward the end. I’m excited, but I’m also really nervous and stressed. This time I was really hard on myself. I had gotten better at painting, but I had higher standards.” Her ascendancy in the art world had been swift. This show was highly anticipated. “And then it sucked because I was running out of time … So usually I can sacrifice things, but I had such ambitious ideas for the painting …”

The day came when t

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