Pace Gallery

Pace is pleased to present new works by Matthew Day Jackson at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York from May 12 to July 1. This presentation—coinciding with Frieze New York and TEFAF New York—will mark Jackson’s debut solo show with the gallery and his first exhibition in New York in a decade. Titled Against Nature, the artist’s upcoming exhibition will center on a focused body of work that includes painting and sculpture. Through his expansive practice, Jackson explores a wide range of subjects—historical, futuristic, scientific, spiritual, and fantastical. At the core of his work is a deep interest in finding similarities within binaries and dichotomies, particularly the simultaneity of beauty and horror. In his research-based, experimental process, the artist considers conceptual and physical underpinnings equally significant, incorporating combinations of traditional, industrial, and found materials in his work across painting, sculpture, installation, and other mediums. Named for Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel Against Nature—in which a French aristocrat named Jean Des Esseintes departs Paris to indulge his obsessive, insatiable desire for luxury and beauty in the countryside, exploiting natural resources for his own aesthetic ends—Jackson’s forthcoming presentation with Pace in New York will be anchored by ten new landscape paintings. Using a semi-autonomous laser process that imbues colors and forms in these works with an otherworldly feel, the artist mines the history of landscape painting, with an eye towards Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran. Similarly, the work of 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, known primarily for his studies of motion and his learned expertise in darkroom photography, has informed Jackson’s interest in unearthly landscape scenes featuring perspectival distortions and uncanny coloration. With his new paintings, Jackson eschews stylistic signatures to investigate the complexities of authorship and undermine mythologies of artistic “genius.” As part of a process that combines physical and digital modes of making, the artist brings issues of materiality and form—as opposed to gesture and expression—to the fore of his latest works. Replete with art historical allusions, the artist’s new landscape paintings also reference the conventions of landscape in science fiction film and literature, where the strange and familiar converge. Jackson creates these composite works by layering images sourced from landscape photography and painting as well as everyday scenes he has captured on his iPhone. As such, tensions between artifice and authenticity; reality and unreality; ambiguity and clarity cut across these highly detailed, hallucinatory scenes, eliciting curiosity and wonderment. Upending viewers’ expectations and initial impressions, Jackson’s complex works—rife with visual paradoxes—invite questions of medium, materiality, and meaning that are only answered through sustained consideration and interrogation. Uniting visions of suburbia and the sublime, the exhibition’s sensorial offerings will extend to the olfactory realm. An ineffable scent—produced by the artist in collaboration with ArtOlfactionLab team at Bestscent—will linger throughout the gallery space. This immersive element will transport viewers into the imaginary environments and atmospheres of the landscapes on view. The presentation will also include a sculptural work that directly references Huysmans’s novel Against Nature, in which the protagonist, Des Esseintes, uses his wealth to enjoy any and all pleasures of the senses within his own hermetically sealed bubble of privilege. At one point in the story, Des Esseintes commissions a Parisian lapidary to encrust a living tortoise with jewels—he is unphased and unmoved when the tortoise dies upon delivery to his home. Connecting this character’s disregard for expense, labor, and conservation with present-day treatment of the natural environment, Jackson will present a ring inspired by Huysmans’s tortoise narrative in his exhibition. Created through a collaboration and trade between Jackson and designer Solange Azagury-Partridge, the ring, which is owned by the artist, will be displayed in a specially built case. With his inclusion of this piece, Jackson draws attention to his own embodiment of Huysmans’s critique, comparing the insularity of an artist’s studio with Des Esseintes’s self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world.

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of eight monumentally scaled paintings by Nigel Cooke at its 540 West 25th Street gallery. On view from May 12 to July 1, this exhibition will spotlight new, vibrant canvases featuring enactments of duality, tension, opposition, and entropy. Titled How the World Became Natural, the show will coincide with the 2023 editions of Frieze New York and TEFAF New York. Cooke is known for his evocative, atmospheric paintings that unite figurative forms and abstract elements in layered compositions. The artist’s work is informed by a wide range of subjects, including paleontology, neuroscience, classical mythology, and zoology, and his process is often guided by his experiences in different parts of the world and other autobiographical material. In Cooke’s paintings, intricate networks of calligraphic marks serve as portraits of psychological and physical spaces alike, fluctuating between states of balance and collapse. Borrowing its title from paleontologist Loren Eiseley’s 1960 essay describing the evolution of mythic to scientific thinking in the field of natural history, Cooke’s upcoming exhibition with Pace in New York spotlights a selection of large-scale, horizontal paintings created by the artist this year. For these works, Cooke has experimented with an entirely different mode of painting to transport viewers into a world of intense colors and lyrical forms. Instead of building up his compositions with marks layered atop one another in a linear fashion, he has forged these impressionistic new works through a process of erasure. With an eye towards the relationship between the background and foreground of his paintings, Cooke uses colliding and overlapping forms to obscure some elements while accentuating others. In this way, he imbues his works with a sense of immeasurable depth. How the World Became Natural follows Cooke’s recent solo exhibition with Pace in London, where the artist showed six vertical paintings and a group of works on paper. His New York presentation will offer a look into an expanded formal universe that elaborates on the stylistic vocabulary showcased in the English capital. In contrast to those saturated canvases, Cooke’s latest paintings also feature greater nuance in terms of color, tone, and mood. Drawing inspiration from the late works of Titian, Monet, and Turner for his new canvases, Cooke has adopted a more painterly mode of mark making. By way of this approach, his new paintings take on an immersive quality as the viewer moves closer to them, becoming cinematic panoramas when seen from afar. The artist also takes a more comprehensive and grandiose approach to space with these epically scaled works. In constructing a painting, Cooke is always directed by his own intuitive stream of thought originating from a singular subject or personal attachment—something he has seen, read, heard, or felt. The beginnings of any given composition are ultimately replaced by a process through which Cooke understands and comes to terms with a new concept invented by the painting itself. His resulting works are mysterious and ambiguous, replete with fleeting and shapeshifting images that can be interpreted in numerous ways. Each work also bears a poetic, open-ended title that invites a multiplicity of readings. Many of the works in Cooke’s exhibition with Pace in New York meditate on inner life and relationships—the worlds that are all one’s own and the worlds that one shares with other people. Some of the paintings are based on pairs of interlocking figures—these compositions are transformed to tell the story of a relationship through a language of flowing and breaking forms. Expressions of motion and disruption, growth and collapse cut across all of the new works in the show, with their landscape formats allowing for pronounced cycles of surges and interruptions.

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Trevor Paglen at its 540 West 25th Street gallery. On view from May 12 to July 22, this exhibition will mark the artist’s first solo presentation with Pace in New York. Featuring photography, sculpture, video, and other work, this thematic presentation will examine the enduring effects of military and CIA influence operations on American culture.

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Maysha Mohamedi at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. On view from May 12 to July 1, this show, titled "Gamebreaker," will mark the artist’s debut exhibition with Pace and her first-ever solo presentation in New York. "Gamebreaker" will coincide with the 2023 editions of Frieze New York and TEFAF New York.

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of the work "18 Verses" (2022) by Grada Kilomba at its 540 West 25th Street flagship in New York from May 12 to July 1. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Goodman Gallery, marks the artist’s debut presentation with Pace. Kilomba, who joined Pace’s program in the US in 2023, has nurtured a practice centering on decolonial storytelling. This exhibition will spotlight her sculptural installation "18 Verses," which has never before been exhibited in the US.

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Lee Kun-Yong at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This presentation, titled Snail’s Gallop and on view from July 14 to August 19, will bring together large-scale paintings and a performance work by the artist, along with archival materials from his storied career.

Pace is pleased to present Song Dong's latest series of works at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York from July 14 to August 19, marking the artist’s first overseas solo exhibition since the COVID-19 pandemic.