Pace Prints

Pace Prints is pleased to present an exhibition of monoprints by Andrew Schoultz. This presentation of unique prints made at the Pace Prints studios is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view at 536 West 22nd Street, April 19 – May 11, 2024. Known for his murals, paintings and immersive installations, Andrew Schoultz deploys imagery that arises directly from the history of printmaking yet situates it in formats that explode the traditional boundaries of printing. Drawn widely from the illustrations of Renaissance and Enlightenment books, the elements of his compositions are recognizable for their archaic rendering in the strong parallel lines of traditional wood engraving. However, where 16th Century engravers applied this laborious form of drawing with stoic precision in the service of encyclopedic or religious projects, Schoultz unfurls linework with the freedom of a breaking wave and the force of a comic book explosion. Where book plates adhere to restricted palettes, Schoultz injects his lines with a shifting prism of colors that collide and overlay each other with concentrated optical energy. Andrew Schoultz worked in the Pace Prints studio with printers Mackenzie Kimler and Sarah Carpenter, drawing figures and patterns on etching and relief plates to be used as the foundation of this series of monoprints. The central figures—the all-seeing owl, the wooden war horse, the leonine beast, the ark-like ship tossed on rough seas—could be familiar elements of fantasy or fairy-tale. Yet, dislocated from a connecting narrative, these motifs become totemic icons of esoteric phenomena, lonely figures locked in a struggle against unseen forces, which enter the prints as waves and clouds of energy in tense overlays of line patterns. Shoultz positions this as a battle between human creations and the forces of nature. The artist’s vision and printers’ skills come to a point in the virtuosic use of color blends and transitions on the inked plates which embody optical events of fission and radiation. The sharply etched bodies of the subjects dissolve in the visual fallout of layers of oil-based relief inks. The monoprints were then sent to Schoultz’s studio, where the artist completed them with hand-drawn embellishments and collage over the printed motifs. In several images, the tension of lines, colors and images is enacted on a smaller scale by collaged currency—man-made symbols of stability and authority sublimated by greater natural forces in the tenuous form of leaves and a ship’s sails strained by the power of the wind. On other prints, Schoultz arrays a flock of birds in motion like torpedoes, rendered in an interlocking pattern in a nod to M.C. Escher and the destabilizing effects of Op Art.

Pace Prints is pleased to present Spill Spell, an exhibition of unique works by Keltie Ferris on view April 12 – May 11, 2024, at 536 West 22nd Street. This presentation will focus on works made at the Pace Paper studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn between 2022 and 2024. Keltie Ferris is interested in the expression of materials through the manipulation of elements. Notably, handmade paper involves a large amount of one major element: water. In his first print experiments making blowout drawings, Ferris takes a unique approach to papermaking by physically drawing with water using a hose as an instrument to spray a wet sheet, obscuring any hard lines with layers of pigmented fibers. Through this process, the artist can create gestural water drawings at bodily scale, each layer providing opportunities to create varying depths of tones. These unique works celebrate the intensity of pigment inherent in the paper-making process through non-representational expressions of color moved by water. In his pigment dispersions, Keltie Ferris uses water as a tool for suspension and timing. He worked with master papermaker Rachel Gladfelter to place pigments such as magenta, yellow ochre, and his signature iridescent silver in abaca fibers and disperse them with water, often moving them with a spatula as the sheet slowly drains. Once completed, the sheet is transferred from the paper mold face down, in a process called couching. The artist does not see the finished work until it is pressed and dry a few days later, invoking the element of surprise. The rebellious nature of water makes controlling it impossible, but Ferris finds joy in the spontaneous improvisations necessary to work with the element instead of against it. Given the short amount of time allowed for their creation, the works inspire freedom of play in a burst of action from the artist. Because each image is created in real time by the artist in this way, they are all unique and can never be repeated. Keltie Ferris’ experience at the paper studio has expanded his creative exploration of material, and paper pulp has become another important facet of his artistic practice alongside painting.

Pace Prints is pleased to announce Chuck Close: Portraits of Artists, on view March 14 – April 6, 2024, at 536 West 22nd Street. A public opening reception will be held Thursday, March 14, 6–8pm. Chuck Close (1940–2021) was a remarkably versatile and creative printmaker who utilized a wide range of techniques to render images of himself and his friends. In addition to his self portraits, the exhibition presents images in a variety of printing techniques that portray Close’s friends and fellow artists John Chamberlain, Philip Glass, Lyle Ashton Harris, Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Lucas Samaras, and James Siena. The exhibition focuses on prints from from 1980 to 2015 created using processes including intaglio, etching, woodcut, screen printing, and pigmented paper pulp. Chuck Close was highly exacting but indefatigably curious and gracious in his collaborative relationships with printmakers. Throughout his career, Close remained deeply indebted to his generative work in the early 1980s with master printer Joe Wilfer, who pioneered the use of stenciled paper pulp. This gridding technique opened up revelatory possibilities for Close’s modular approach to portraiture and initiated decades of printmaking collaborations with Pace Prints and the Pace Paper studio, where Ruth Lingen, Akemi Martin, and Rachel Gladfelter succeeded Wilfer as directors. Pace Prints published Close’s screen prints over three decades with Bob Blanton’s Brand X workshop and Pace Print’s own screen printing studio, directed by Jo Watanabe. Though he was initially reluctant to employ a technique which he deemed too photographic, his work with these master printers lead him to explore the complex combinations of color and mark-making that it allows. His explorations in the medium continued through to his last self-portrait screen print in 2012. Intaglio techniques, in particular soft ground and spit bite etching, were an avenue for Close to work with direct mark-making on a plate. The projects that arose through his collaborations with Aldo Crommelynck, Julia D’Amario, Bill Hall and Kathy Kuehn beginning at Pace Prints’ Spring Street Workshop in the 1980s led to a lifelong engagement with intaglio printing and work with further generations of printers including Justin Israels, Sarah Carpenter and others. Yasu Shibata brought his skills as a master Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcut printer to the Pace Prints workshop in 2001. The unique capacity of water-based wood block printing to incorporate overlays and blending of colors was a perfect match for Close’s experimentation with color in the last decades of his career. With Chuck Close: Portraits of Artists Pace Prints is grateful and proud to look back on 40 years of collaborations with Chuck Close and to see the lasting impact of both what he learned from and contributed to contemporary printmaking.

Pace Prints is pleased to announce an exhibition of prints by Jean Dubuffet, on view February 16 – March 9, 2024, at its gallery located at 536 West 22nd Street. A public opening reception will be held Friday, February 16, 6–8pm. The exhibition of print and multiple editions will include a variety of Dubuffet’s iconic imagery, published in the 1970s by Pace Prints, in which he employed both traditional and innovative uses of the screen printing technique. In his Présences Fugaces series of prints and Le Vizir, Dubuffet (1901–1985) employed the traditional screen printing process to render his signature L’Hourloupe figurative personnages in two different scales directly on paper. In contrast, the Site de Mémoire series of monumental screen print editions were created by printing the image directly onto stretched canvas, an unconventional application of the medium. Dubuffet made another ingenious use of the screen printing process for his sculptural multiple edition, Le Tétrascopique. It was realized by printing interlocking fields of figurative and abstract elements onto both sides of four shaped panels, arranged in a square to form a hollow column, with multiple faces visible from any vantage point. Like his gigantic “painted sculptures” Le Tétrascopique creates a multi-layered interplay between picture and three-dimensional space. In the exhibited Faits Mémorables prints, Dubuffet expanded the use of screen printing by doubling the process to create the illusion of three-dimensional collaged images. Figurative and abstract images were printed first and then layered, before being re-screened and reprinted to create the final collaged illusion on the flat printed surfaces. The scope of Dubuffet’s prolific creativity is encapsulated in these printed works, that span a period in which both his style and technical experimentation evolved rapidly and came to cement his singular legacy as a groundbreaking innovator of visual art.

Pace Prints is pleased to announce Longing For The Light, Love Letters From The Gloaming, an exhibition of monoprints by Austin Eddy, on view February 16 – March 23, 2024, at 536 West 22nd Street. This presentation will focus on unique paintings made with paper pulp at the Pace Paper studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. An opening reception will be held Friday, February 16, 6–8pm. Austin Eddy’s new series is a love letter to the end of day; a time that signals a pause on work, the unfilled space on a schedule before settling into evening rituals and slumber. The quiet palette, subject matter, and the symbolism he discovered in the process of papermaking each contribute to the impression of stillness in these unique works that inspires internal reflection. The base of Eddy’s series are multi-process paper pulp paintings, many augmented with hand-drawn elements and collage. While experimenting with this medium he discovered that it recorded time in a more visual way than in his own studio drawing and painting practice. Once the layers of paper pulp dry and are passed through the press, they flatten into one image and the history of the mark making is compressed onto a single plane and essentially erased. The visual silence induces a state of harmony, as though they were never made but have always existed. Though prominent in his work for several years, the motif of the bird is freshly animated in a subdued palette of taupe, inky blue, and earthy gray, among other colors. In For Lovers, a translucent white bird bows its head in reverence over a backdrop of deep mauve signaling the greeting of dusk. The energy radiated by the spare form and muted color of the image inches toward the expression of hibernation. Many of the nocturnal scenes depicted in this series reference lived experiences by Eddy and his loved ones but are distilled into symbolic pictorial language. Numbers, textures, colors, shapes, and patterns pay tribute to components of personal memories of the artist while providing the tools for the viewer to create their own dreamlike associations. For example, The Silence Of A Stream Side Field At Night depicts a bird with markings that allude to internal motion, like springs, propelling it over a blanket of seeds. The bird oscillates between the abstract composition of its parts and surroundings, leaving much to the imagination in terms of what might depict the setting of a story or exactly the marks you see in the paper. Austin Eddy finds a parallel in celebrating the time between day and night and the space between symbolism and representation, leading the viewer to meditate on the beauty of ambiguity.

Pace Prints is pleased to present an exhibition of recent editions, featuring prints and monoprints from the last five years by Nina Chanel Abney, Nick Doyle, Keltie Ferris, Derek Fordjour, Austin Lee, Hilary Pecis, Adam Pendleton and Robin F. Williams. The exhibition will be on view January 12 – February 3, 2024.

Pace Prints is pleased to announce a presentation of trial proofs by José Lerma, on view December 1–22, 2023, at 536 West 22nd Street. This presentation will focus on unique trial proofs made of cast paper pulp at the Pace Prints paper shop in Gowanus, Brooklyn. An opening reception will be held Thursday, November 30, 6–8pm. José Lerma was first inspired to make thick paintings of portraits many years ago, when he saw a painting of a crowd by Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. He observed that the further away from the foreground the figures were, the less information about their features was depicted. The furthest appeared with no face at all, composed of a few limited brushstrokes, diluted to only the suggestion of a person. Lerma extrapolated this technique in his own work but focused on the composition of a single subject. He scaled everything up, including the size of the canvas, the tools he used, and the figure. The effect distorts the perception of space making one feel miniature in comparison to the large daubs of paint, recalling sensations of childhood when one explores a world of objects they have not yet grown into. At the Pace Prints Paper shop, a mold of Lerma’s painting was constructed to pick up the minute details of the contours of his brushwork. This was used to cast pigmented pulp into many layers which hardened into sculptural components of varying colors. They were arranged and mounted on a thick backing sheet of handmade paper, re-creating the composition of the source painting. The result exudes tactility with soft, matte textures and even softer hues. With a penchant for what he calls “slower colors,” Lerma pulled from the Rococo style palette and muted pastels to create a sense of balance with the playful antagonism of the form. Rather than portraits, José Lerma refers to his works as “people-shaped abstractions” that allow him to push the potential of material; paper components that take on the attributes of sculpture, for example. By subverting expectations of how a medium should behave or appear, Lerma creates a sense of playful exploration, prompting constant engagement with the environment in new and surprising ways.

Pace Prints is pleased to present an exhibition of recent editions, featuring prints and monoprints from the last five years by Nina Chanel Abney, Nick Doyle, Leonardo Drew, Daniel Heidkamp, Rafa Macarrón, Andrew Schoultz, Shahzia Sikander, Robin F. Williams and Jonas Wood. The exhibition will be on view December 1–22, 2023.

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.