Pace Gallery

Pace is pleased to present [action=query]: Black Arts and Black Aesthetics, an exhibition organized by Kristen Owens, the gallery’s inaugural Wikimedia Fellow. Presented in the library on the gallery’s first floor, this presentation is the culmination of Owens’s self-guided research into the Black American and Black diasporic artists who have been represented by or exhibited with Pace during its 60-year history. To mark Black History Month, [action=query]: Black Arts and Black Aesthetics will run from February 1 to 25.

Pace is pleased to present Love Letter, a group exhibition curated by artists Loie Hollowell and Harminder Judge. This show will bring works by Hollowell and Judge in conversation with paintings by Agnes Pelton, a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group in the United States, and Ghulam Rasool Santosh, a modernist Kashmiri painter and poet associated with the neo-tantra painting movement in India. Together, the 24 works in the exhibition—six by each of the four artists included—will conjure new connections between painting of the 20th century and the present day, foregrounding the experiential and transportive power of abstraction. Running concurrently with Hollowell’s first institutional solo show in the US at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, Love Letter will be complemented by a dedicated booklet produced by Pace Publishing and available on-site at the gallery in spring 2023. With Love Letter, Hollowell and Judge will present a personal and heartfelt ode to two painters who have deeply impacted their own practices. Rather than attempting to fill art historical gaps with this show, the artists aim to cultivate new dialogues across temporal and geographic boundaries. Coursing through the exhibition—which brings works by Hollowell, Judge, Pelton, and Santosh together for the first time—is an ineffable spirituality. These four artists are united in their efforts to represent the intangible through the phenomenological languages of color, shape, and light. Hollowell and Judge invite viewers to engage in meditative encounters with the paintings in Love Letter to uncover new formal and conceptual links among the artists’ distinctive interconnected practices. Hollowell is known for her otherworldly paintings and drawings exploring bodily landscapes. Through a unique lexicon of geometric and organic forms that represent the human body, its capabilities, and its processes, the artist examines her relationship to her own embodied experiences with sex, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and motherhood. Using radiant color, space, light, volume and scale, gradients, and protruding sculptural elements, Hollowell draws viewers into her energetic compositions. In Love Letter, she will present six recent paintings that examine the relationships between the body, mind, and spirit. Among Hollowell’s contributions to the show are Split orbs in mauve, magenta, green, teal and yellow (2022) and Fully Dilated (2022), which exemplify her ability to convert physiological and psychological subject matter into ethereal abstractions. Judge often refers to his sculptural abstractions as “portals,” and his work is heavily influenced by the history of neo- tantric painting in India—a 20th century movement for which Santosh was a leading voice—as well as abstract expressionist and color field painting from the same period. His alchemical process for creating these works involves layering pigments into pools of wet plaster, followed by prolonged periods of excavation, sanding, polishing and oiling. Through this technique, the artist produces expansive modular panels and smaller, often shaped works that seem to hover off the wall. Judge’s compositions intensify and fully reveal themselves over time, resulting in gleaming, vibrating surfaces in which monolithic forms, bodily abstractions, seething horizons, and bold colors arise from granite-like depths. Interplays between the granular and the cosmic are central to the material phenomena taking place in Judge’s works, which appear at once crystallized and in flux. Viewers are invited to look through, rather than at, the works he creates by way of this experimental fresco method. The alternate realms to which Judge’s works lead are open- ended, vast, and as unknowable as the cosmos. In Love Letter, he will show recent works that, situated in conversation with paintings by Hollowell, Pelton, and Santosh, speak to visual and spiritual expressions of the micro and macro, of interiority and exteriority. Pelton is known for her radiant canvases depicting dreamscapes mined from the artist’s own psyche—in recent years, her paintings have garnered significant institutional attention in the US. Santosh’s paintings, rarely exhibited in North America, make use of bold color and symmetrical compositions to unearth a universal spirituality. Historic works by these two artists—who took up their painting practices to find deeper meaning in life—bring philosophical gravity to the fore of Love Letter. Pelton’s paintings, which will figure in the upcoming group exhibition Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, are marked by rich color, organic and lyrical forms, and celestial plays of light through which the artist brought her innermost visions to life. Among the works by Pelton in Love Letter are Caves of the Mind (1929), featuring multicolored openings illuminated by a soft light; Rose & Palm (1931), which reflects the artist’s intense interest in symbolism; and The Chalice (1932), in which spindly, linear formations weave in and around a vessel. Pelton’s legacy can be most clearly traced in paintings by Hollowell, who has cited the artist as an enduring influence and inspiration. Santosh’s symmetrical compositions, rendered in vivid, saturated colors, are concerned with enactments of harmony and balance. Like Pelton, Santosh aimed to give visual form to mystical and divine subjects, and his work often explores cosmic topographies in which self-contained geometric entities exist as part of a unified whole. The artist imbued his meticulously constructed tableaus with numerical and symbolic meaning, bringing historical devotional painting traditions and tantric iconographies from India into dialogue with elements of European Modernism, especially the visual language of Cubism. In his work, Santosh cultivated a new, spiritually resonant geometric formalism. Santosh began his painting practice later in life, and his canvases from the 1970s and 1980s will figure in Love Letter. Among these works is Untitled (1984), in which biomorphic and geometric shapes coalesce into an imagined landscape.

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent work by Tara Donovan at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. On view from January 13 to February 25, the show will bring together a selection of screen drawings made with aluminum insect screen.

Pace is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition that juxtaposes works by the late photographer, painter, and sculptor William Christenberry, and the interdisciplinary artist, photographer, and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross.

Pace is pleased to present a multifaceted program—comprising an in-person exhibition, an accompanying performance series organized by Pace Live, a dedicated online viewing room, and a new generative NFT series—dedicated to Robert Whitman. The in-person and online exhibitions, along with the live performances, will focus on the artist’s seminal 1960 performance work American Moon, a production realized as part of the experimental Happenings scene on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The release of Whitman’s first-ever web3 project—which transports viewers to otherworldly, cosmic landscapes beyond the Earth—will coincide with the exhibitions and live events centering on American Moon. A pioneer of performance and multimedia installation art, Whitman has devoted his career to exploration and collaboration. He was a major figure in the ephemeral Happenings—a hybrid art form spanning installation, performance, and other mediums that is foundational in Pace’s history and its interdisciplinary program today— presented in New York in the postwar years by a group of artists that also included Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Red Grooms. Whitman was at the vanguard of scientifically and technologically engaged art making during this period, co-founding the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a collective that supported creative partnerships between artists and engineers, in 1967. The four performances of American Moon, which will feature a recreation of Whitman’s original set for the work, will take place from January 18 to 19 at the gallery’s 508 West 25th Street location. This set will serve as the cornerstone of the physical exhibition, on view from January 18 to February 3. A selection of preparatory drawings Whitman created for the 1960 performance will be displayed alongside the set, and these works on paper will be the subject of a focused online exhibition from January 18 to February 10. On the occasion of this performance series and exhibition with Pace in New York, Whitman will also unveil his first NFT project, titled New Worlds and produced as part of the expansive partnership between Pace Verso, the gallery’s web3 hub, and the leading generative art platform Art Blocks. The interactive and generative New Worlds NFTs, which depict imagined planetary bodies in space, are based on Whitman’s projections of planets and moons presented in his solo exhibition Turning at Pace’s New York gallery in 2007. The planets in the NFTs feature distinctive colors and patterns on their surfaces, and they are situated in vast skies rendered in varying hues and opacities. Viewers can navigate around the planets and explore the celestial environments by zooming in and out and dragging their cursors on the screen. Selections from the New Worlds NFT series will be exhibited on screens in Whitman’s physical exhibition at Pace’s New York gallery. Further details about the launch of the New Worlds NFTs will be revealed in the coming weeks. Pace’s forthcoming presentations of American Moon and Whitman’s NFT release situate his influential practice in a contemporary context, bringing his artistic achievements and innovations to new audiences. Together, the components of this hybrid program—which traverses physical and digital mediums—reflect the limber, rigorous, and timeless nature of the artist’s work and showcase the breadth of his oeuvre across various formats. American Moon premiered at the Reuben Gallery in New York on November 29, 1960, and the work was performed some ten times through early December of that year. The original presentation of American Moon—for which the artist constructed an immersive environment made with construction paper, used fabrics, and scrap lumber— featured Whitman himself, fellow artists Lucas Samaras and Simone Forti, and other performers. Incorporating flashes of light, moments of total darkness, film projections, and cacophonous sounds, American Moon induced feelings of awe and disorientation in audience members, who watched the event from semi-enclosed tunnels built as part of the set. The final portion of the performance saw Samaras suspended on a swing above the installation. “The thing about theater that most interests me is that it takes time,” Whitman once said. “Time for me is something material. I like to use it that way. It can be used in the same way as paint or plaster or any other material. It can describe other natural events.” In her book Happenings: New York, 1958-1963, Milly Glimcher writes that, amid the production and debut of American Moon, “John F. Kennedy had just been elected—the first glamorous, media-savvy president—and hopes were high for a new approach to culture and world relations.” Glimcher continues, “For American Moon, Whitman spent three weeks clearing and rebuilding the interior of the gallery ... Whitman believes the homemade, rough quality of the construction gave the work an organic and authentic quality.” The upcoming rendition of Whitman’s American Moon at Pace’s New York gallery is produced by Pace Live, the gallery’s interdisciplinary platform for commissioning and presenting new live art performances, musical acts, and other events. The four showings of American Moon—staged over the course of two days amid a structure of scaffolding, fabric, craft paper, burlap, and varied props—will each include six performers. The set, along with Whitman’s sketches for the 1960 iteration of the work, will remain on view for visitors to experience through February 3. Further information about the performances of American Moon will be released in the coming weeks.

Pace is pleased to present 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, an unprecedented international exhibition by David Hockney. The global exhibition will be jointly presented this fall and winter across five cities: Annely Juda Fine Art in London; Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris; GRAY in Chicago; L.A. Louver in Los Angeles; and Pace in New York. 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures presents works created by Hockney in 2021, expanding on a series of iPad paintings in 2020 while quarantining at his studio and residence in Normandy, France. Inspired by his daily observations, Hockney devoted himself to the iPad, a medium of unique immediacy that allowed him to be prolific in his depictions of his home, the changing seasons, and surrounding countryside. Of his iPad paintings, each gallery will present two distinct series of editioned and signed inkjet prints: five landscapes, twenty floral still lifes, and a composite piece of three iPad paintings, depicting a Gladioli. These two series reveal the presence of Hockney’s hand as well as his deliberate technique for drafting larger-than-life compositions on the iPad. While Hockney’s flowers capture the fleeting stillness of his subjects, his immersive landscapes establish the vastness of his rural surroundings. Whether bound to a single moment in time or created from multiple planes of vision, Hockney’s distinctive sense of time and space draws from art historical examples ranging from the Bayeux Tapestry and seventeenth-century Chinese scrolls to the still lifes of Henri Matisse. A cornerstone of the series, Hockney’s landscapes call upon his observations of the changing of seasons. In each of his gridded picture planes, Hockney reimagines the Normandy countryside with bright colors, abstracted forms, and impossible angles of otherwise traditional outdoor scenes. Placing his focus on themes of renewal and rebirth, the resulting body of work reflects the pastoral nostalgia and beauty of the natural world. First reproduced by the German newspaper, Die Welt, and later debuted at Musée Matisse in Nice, Hockney’s series of twenty flower iPad paintings captures various arrangements of blooms set against a backdrop of gingham tablecloths and burgundy walls. “I was just sitting at the table in our house, and I caught sight of some flowers in a vase on the table,” Hockney explains. “A few days later I started another from the same position with the same ceramic vase. This took longer to do. I then realized if I put the flowers in a glass vase the sun would catch the water, and painting glass would be a more interesting thing to do. So then I was off.” Though attributes vary in each work, such as the species of flower—including one gladiola plant—and the color of the tablecloth, consistent elements across this series allow viewers to admire Hockney’s technique and dedication to his subject. Capturing a spectrum of floral compositions with contrasting tones and textures, Hockney displays his propensity for balancing the central artistic elements of line, color, and perspective. At the center of the exhibition, Hockney debuts his latest large-scale photographic drawing, 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed). Within the composition, Hockney is depicted twice – once on the right side of the scene, and once on the left – sitting in an armchair and looking upon his twenty flower still lifes displayed salon-style on a navy-blue wall. “This is photographic but is in no way an ordinary photograph,” Hockney describes. “I had been doing what I called photographic drawings, giving a much more 3D effect. This is because you have to look at these through time (unlike an ordinary photograph which you see all at once).” From a series of individual photographs, Hockney constructs a seamless panorama that defies the natural parameters of time and space. The photographic drawing pulls viewers into a self- referential world that is at once familiar and entirely new. “Most people thought the photograph was the ultimate depiction of reality, didn’t they? People thought, This is it, this is the end of it. Which it’s not. And I’m very certain it’s not, but not many people think the way I do.” To accompany the exhibition, GRAY, Galerie Lelong & Co., Pace, Annely Juda Fine Art, and L.A. Louver are pleased to announce the release of David Hockney: 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures (English and French, 76 pages, 24 x 31 cm). The book will feature an essay by the artist and color illustrations of the works on view in the exhibition.