Pace Prints

Pace Prints is pleased to announce Sam Gilliam: Make it Wonderful, an exhibition of monoprints by Sam Gilliam (1933–2022), on view October 13 – November 18, 2023, at 536 West 22nd Street. This exhibition will focus on thirteen large-scale monoprints that Sam Gilliam created in 2021 at the Brandywine Workshop and Archives. An opening reception will be held Thursday, October 12, from 6–8pm. Sam Gilliam’s legacy as a pioneer in postwar American art reaches well beyond the movement of Color-Field Painting of which he was an integral part of in the mid-1960s in Washington, DC. Gilliam was an innovator, and throughout his life and work he was driven by a strong predisposition toward material experimentation. He changed the course of abstract expressionist art when he released the canvas from its stretcher to create his first iconic drape paintings in 1965. Gilliam was a master at manipulating print material and brought his relentless experimentation into any workshop. In his later work, Gilliam engaged digital technology to assist in the printmaking process, including thirteen large-scale monoprints on view at Pace Prints which he made in collaboration with Brandywine Workshop and Archives in Philadelphia. Brandywine is a nonprofit organization established to produce limited-edition screenprints. As their first artist-in-residence in 1975, Sam Gilliam became involved in growing and supporting their initiatives. Later, as a member of the board, Gilliam cemented this important creative partnership that spanned decades. Make it Wonderful presents one of the last projects produced from this collaboration before Gilliam’s passing in 2022. Pulled from a single watercolor painting, the color areas were digitally separated into three values: light, medium, and dark, to produce a series of what Giliam referred to as “emphatic black and white prints.” Using oil-based lithography ink the monoprints were created from maple wood blocks milled with a computer numerical control (CNC) router. Gilliam described the importance of tactility in his process: “When you run your hand across the surface, you can feel how it is made... A blind person is the one who sees.” Though the works were made in Brandywine’s workshop, the pieces traveled back and forth to Sam Gilliam’s studio in Washington DC where he would implement changes, including a pivot away from grayscale toward reviving earlier color concepts. The variations, from marbled texture to a spectrum of bright diptychs, to black and white works elevated with silver ink, are anchored by complex additive and subtractive qualities. By rearranging the sequence of blocks and color, Gilliam experimented with endless combinations concluding in vastly different images, some composed of over twenty layers. The result is an exemplary use of innovative technology in printmaking that expanded upon the possibility of what could be done without compromising the will of the artist. These monoprints are guided by Gilliam’s vision, and the expertise of the printmakers who articulated it.

Pace Prints is pleased to announce Melanoidin, a solo exhibition of new works by artist Chase Hall, on view September 8 – October 7, 2023, at 536 West 22nd Street. Chase Hall’s practice makes space for both generational celebrations and traumas encoded throughout American history by exploring representation in portraiture and the exploitation of material resources. Uniting cotton paper and coffee grounds, he builds compositions of figures including sports, jazz and familial subjects, among others, intertwining complex trajectories of race, hybridity, and economics. This exhibition is Hall’s first presentation of works created using a technique he developed over the last three years spent working with Justin Israels at the Pace Prints studio. Previously, the artist utilized only the liquid from pressed coffee as a medium. Through experimentation, Hall has incorporated the grounds by mixing them with etching medium and traces of ink to create subtle variations in textures influenced by the size of grounds and relief of the plates. The result produces a wide range of colors akin to skin tones, from rich blacks through a broad swath of browns and tans juxtaposed against the voids of pigment in which Hall refers to as “conceptual white paint,” most prominently depicted in the work Sheep’s Wool, where patches of color are missing from the subject’s face. The adaptation of coffee beans as a medium points to the commodification and distribution of valued resources from Africa and South America. Paired with paper made of cotton, the leading industry of the American South built on enslavement, these materials make up the physical and symbolic infrastructure of Hall’s practice as a painter and a printmaker. Chase Hall responds to a variety of social and visual systems in the presentation of his subjects and how he builds composition to invoke a sense of camaraderie, refusal, honor, and respectability. The collared shirt and proud posture of the figure in Black Direction, the breaking of a smile with sullen eyes in Baylee and the Bandanna, all allude to the collision of pressures that occur when one fights against the odds. Combining these elements of tribute evokes a sense of the shared plight of heroes and friends who navigate the barriers of society towards exceeding the potential of humanity. Melanoidin is Hall’s first solo exhibition at Pace Prints and will run concurrently with his upcoming New York solo exhibition The Bathers at David Kordansky Gallery, September 5 – October 14.

Pace Prints is pleased to present an exhibition of prints by Sol LeWitt, on view March 24 – April 29, 2023, at 536 West 22nd Street. This exhibition will focus on LeWitt’s prints spanning from the 1980s to the 2000s.

Pace Prints is pleased to announce an exhibition of monoprints by Pat Steir, that will be on view February 10 – March 18, 2023, at its new location at 536 West 22nd Street. The public is invited to an opening reception on Thursday, February 9, 6-8pm. Pat Steir’s five-decade career as a painter has also included extensive explorations and innovative work in various printmaking mediums. Her iconic style, referencing waterfalls, resulted from her in-depth analysis of the application of pigments, specifically their relation to gravity, color layering, and density. Pat Steir’s prints have evolved from her earlier etchings to an extensive use of the medium of silkscreen printing. In this exhibition of her monoprints, Steir has utilized the screen printing process to create work in a large scale, directly applying the energy of her mark and the flow of her palette. For her, it is a performance of painting and color. Working with Pace Print’s Master Printer Jo Watanabe and others over several decades, she has created an ambitious series of dazzling hand-painted and hand-drawn monoprints. Many of these monoprints combine a base of screen-printed layers, onto which Steir applied oil paint and other mediums to the previously silkscreened layers. She has forged a unique and organic approach to the medium, where gesture, time and chance guide the outcome of each unique monoprint. These images exhibit an unbounded chromatic range and extend her signature motif of the waterfall, creating immersive fields of light and movement. The aesthetic of many of the images in this exhibition resonate with Steir’s recent exhibition of paintings, Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls, at our neighboring gallery, Hauser & Wirth.

Featuring works by Nina Chanel Abney, Nigel Cooke, Nick Doyle, Leonardo Drew, Chase Hall, Daniel Heidkamp, Arturo Herrera, Friedrich Kunath, Adam Pendleton, Peter Saul, Kara Walker, Robin F. Williams, and Jonas Wood.

Pace Prints is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by artist Blair Saxon-Hill, on view November 18–December 23, 2022, at Pace Prints’ new gallery location at 536 West 22nd Street. This presentation, titled City Dip is the artist's first exhibition at the gallery after a residency funded by the Ford Family Foundation. Working across mediums, Blair Saxon-Hill creates figurative assemblages and fabric collages on panel that are pedestrian and raw, turning the viewer to a visceral material world of paint and matter to register current cultural and political realities. Saxon-Hill expanded her practice during her residency at Pace Prints by collaborating with master printers Sarah Carpenter, Justin Israels, and Mackenzie Kimler as well as master papermakers Emily Chaplain, Rachel Gladfelter, and Akemi Martin; collectively, they pushed the historical limitations of both print and papermaking. The innovative approaches to making monoprints (singular, unique prints) and collages was grounded by the Portland, Oregon, artist’s consideration of her surroundings. Saxon-Hill’s work reflects the freedom of an artist to be an observer in a new place with New York City as her muse. For the last six years at the Pace Prints’ studio, Justin Israels has perfected a magnetic sheeting printing technology which affords collage-based artists the flexibility to cut printing plates by hand. As a material-driven artist, Saxon-Hill chose to incorporate fabrics into the printing process, further expanding the possibilities of the printing technology. To produce a monoprint, a magnetic plate is first cut by the artist into a puzzle of the image. She then assigned sections for fabric textures to be transferred by the press onto the magnet pieces, utilizing a technique known as pressure printing. The resulting unique print is a myriad of connecting textures and patterns employing a similar patchwork sensibility to that of the artist’s fabric and found object collage works. Seen in the clothing on the figures in the monoprint titled City Dip, the fabric feels embedded in the cityscape, acting in contrast to the delicate blues created by a rainbow roll color gradation. The monoprints on display maximize the potential of surface texture in print and further reward the viewer when the works are viewed up close. In addition to the monoprints, the printers produced large scale monoprinted papers with surface textures and colors predetermined by the artist for her collages. Saxon-Hill describes her collage process as “drawing or thinking with scissors.” In the large-scale collage titled Studio View, Saxon-Hill depicts the print studio’s window with shelves full of potted plants that have been gifted to the printers over the years by artists-in-residence. Saxon-Hill’s meticulous focus on pattern is ever present with each individual element carrying equal weight in the collage’s composition. The plants are arranged with the same playful whimsy as the skyscrapers they supersede. The ethic of reciprocity and care that is shared between the artist and her collaborators in the studio is personified in these sited plants. During the artist’s time at the Pace Prints’ paper studio under the direction of Akemi Martin, Saxon-Hill expanded upon a “wet on wet” transfer technique. In The Psychic, a portrait inspired by a visit to a New York fortune teller, a colorful handmade paper work was created by fusing pigmented wet pulp to wet pulp and collaging in dry ancient fibers, such as kozo (mulberry) and amate (bark) to the wet pulp. Fabrics were once again utilized, this time as a template, to protect portions of wet pulp. The negative spaces of the fabrics were then blown out with water pressure, leaving a lace-like pulp residue of the positive space of the fabric pattern. The overall production process of this pulp collage, which becomes an enormously complex piece of handmade paper when dry, was a feat. The work is massive for a handmade sheet of paper, at 60 by 40 inches, and the largest the studio had made to date. From the neighborhood kids to the peddlers, the dog walkers, and the embracing couples, Saxon-Hill looks to the everyday as a place of attention. Collaborating in these highly complex studio processes during her time in residence, she has once again asserted herself as a truly innovative artist that inserts the world into the work; this time with New York City at the center.

Pace Prints is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of large-scale prints and collages by American painter Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Chicago), on view September 30 – November 12, 2022, at Pace Prints’ new gallery location at 536 West 22nd Street. This presentation, titled "Framily Ties — You Win Some, You Lose Some," will mark the inauguration of the new space and Abney's third exhibition with the gallery since 2018. A public opening reception will be held Thursday, September 29, 6–8pm.