The new art gallery Pace Tokyo brings together simplicity and cleanness; harmony and flow; humans and nature. These are words that crop up regularly in conversations with Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, who is behind the project.

Surrounded by layers of white and quietly soft curves, an Alexander Calder mobile hovering above his head, he says: 'I like to create real simplicity and cleanness. But this isn’t just a white box. There are subtle interventions that entirely change people’s experience in the space.'

Pace Tokyo: a minimalist gallery experience

Pace Tokyo is the influential US gallery’s first Japan outpost, joining spaces in art hot spots around the world, including New York, Seoul and London. The Tokyo gallery spans around 5,500 sq ft across three levels inside the landmark Azabudai Hills development, contained in an undulating low-rise flow of nature-wrapped structures by London-based Thomas Heatherwick.

For Fujimoto, the design hinges on respect for the art itself, he explains: 'The art pieces are the starting point. But the space is also very, very important.' Key to this is a quietly effective detail: all corners are softly curved, eliminating all angled lines. 'The idea was to create a sense of the experience continuing. There are no corners, it’s more like a flow, guiding visitors through the space,’ he says.

'This is an example of a subtle intervention that changes entirely the experience of people. The art gallery elements are quite minimal – but the moment you have a curved, rounded corner, it changes everything.'

Pace Tokyo’s journey begins at ground level. A glass-fronted space is accessed directly from Sakurada Dori, a new street running through Azabudai Hills – and stepping inside, Tokyo’s dynamic tempo immediately slows to a more contemplative rhythm.

While Pace Tokyo will officially open in September 2024 with a show by Californian artist Maysha Mohamedi, for its pre-opening, a curation of works by mainly overseas artists was presented – from a circular form by Torkwase Dyson to the light-reflecting greens of a CD sculpture by Tara Donovan.

Amid the art, Fujimoto’s layered minimism slowly shifts into focus – the blend of white-on-white and softly-rounded corners, plus one expanse of wall curved into the ceiling, evoking a temple-like atmosphere.

'This is Pace’s first time in Japan, so cleanness and simplicity are very important elements,' says Fujimoto. 'In Japanese culture, nothing is fixed. Everything is slowly moving and circulating – energy, wind, pictures, people’s lives are all harmonising and flowing.'

The atmosphere continues in the gallery’s upper two levels, self-contained and accessed via an internal Azabudai Hills escalator. The first floor is a key hub, with further layers of curved corners harmonised with white-stained wood floors alongside works by artists including Richard Pousette-Dart and Jules de Balincourt.

The centre stage is a highlight: the apparently floating form of a light-hanging staircase made up of geometric lines of thin white steel, creating a transparent connective flow to the top level. 'We didn’t want to block the view of the gallery,' says Fujimoto. 'So to make it transparent, we thought a hanging staircase would work best. It’s very thin and light and touches the floor at only two points underneath, so it is almost floating.'

'As everything is quite flat on the gallery surfaces, we thought the lines of the staircase would make a nice contrast and harmony. We wanted the experience of walking up to the top floor to be very special.' The top level has a more intimate atmosphere for meetings and events, with double-height ceilings and windows with minimalist white blinds, and a small kitchen area, flowing into an outdoor terrace.

Seated here, Fujimoto reflects on the cosmos of whites in his work: 'I don’t always stick to white. But it does have a beautiful meaning to me. I grew up in Hokkaido in northern Japan and in wintertime, there is snow and everything is completely white. At the same time, I learned throughout my childhood days that white is not just white – there are many different whites. That gives white an extra meaning to me. Also, in Japan, white has a special meaning – it’s pureness and paper and emptiness in a sense.'

Nature, another key ingredient in his creations, also manifests itself through the subtly of details. 'Japanese traditional culture always tries to reinterpret nature in its design. And every time subtleness has been key. It isn’t about a direct expression of nature in architecture – it’s more about designing the air itself. It’s not aggressive – everything is soft and simple and flowing.'

Highlighting the delicate balance that underpins a gallery space, he adds: 'Because this is a place for art and people, I didn’t want to make the architecture too expressive, too selfish – but at the same time, it should not step back too much. It should have a beautiful harmony and sense of co-existence – between architect, art and of course people. That’s why the subtle design details are really special and important.'

For Marc Glimcher, CEO of Pace Gallery – which is also currently staging an exhibition of Alexander Calder’s work in neighbouring Azabudai Hills Gallery – Fujimoto was a clear fit for understanding the sensitivities of designing a gallery: 'With Sou, it’s not about making a statement. He came up with simple idea to unspool the wall like a continuous scroll. It’s so simple but something I had never seen before.'

While Pace represents a cornucopia of Japanese artists, from Yoshitomo Nara and Kohei Nawa to teamLab, the new Tokyo gallery aims primarily to introduce overseas artists to Japanese audiences.

Highlighting the appeal of opening in Tokyo, Glimcher adds: 'Japanese aesthetic culture is one of few essential ingredients in the history of modernism. And then on the business side, by some measures, Tokyo is the biggest city in the world, it’s an incredibly rich city.

'A lot of people are drawn to the stability and beauty and amazing qualities and best food in the world in Tokyo. And in the last three years, everybody is coming to Tokyo.'

pacegallery.com

sou-fujimoto.net

‘When I was making this show, I thought I would underline that it is a change for my work, from working with Polish 1960s and 1970s ideas of socialism to moving into the countryside,’ says Paulina Olowska, whose show ‘Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas’ is now open at London’s Pace Gallery (until 6 January 2024). ‘It comes along with the foundation that I run, the mycology that crept into my work, and the hauntology which comes from this Mark Fisher idea that you put everything into this metal pot, and it resonates, giving you the haunting voices and so on.’

Olowska intertwines this eclectic blend of references into an exhibition that celebrates a mix of mediums, from painting to photography, puppetry, sound installation and film. The effect is instantly immersive – step in off the street and you’re enveloped into Olowska’s world of Slavic mythological deities and demons. The Mamuna of the title (Polish for ‘strangewife’) is a female swamp character rife with negative associations. In the mystical, magical guises she takes here, Olowska reclaims her.

In large-scale paintings created from photographs, she reclines in the forest, brought to life in realistic compositions. ‘This show for me was about this way of creating objects around nature, because paintings are also about nature. And for me, the biggest test [is that ] I was not a landscape painter. So, within the show, I set myself a goal, painting the first very gestural paintings for one year, and then I was getting into the detailed works of it.’

Olowska, who also creates tapestries, sees the landscape as something to be knitted. The figures in it reappear throughout the exhibition, peering out from cuckoo clocks while interacting in their natural habitats in video installations. Downstairs, they are transformed into life-size puppets, referencing both Ukrainian Motanka, the knotted guardian dolls, and the Polish spring ritual Topienie Marzanny, which sees straw Marzanna dolls symbolising death, winter, and disease being drowned in a river.  

‘With this show, I wanted to underline, for example, the importance of folk art,’ Olowska adds. ‘And actually, it went parallel to the socialist way of thinking. I think I was praising this idea that all forms of art have beauty and importance.’

Paulina Olowska: ‘Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas’ until 6 January 2024 at Pace Gallery, London

pacegallery.com

In his first exhibition with Pace Gallery in New York, the American artist-designer Matthew Day Jackson tackles a wide range of subjects, from the historic and scientific to the spiritual and fantastical. Titled ‘Against Nature’, the show sees Jackson expand his interest in finding similarities between binaries and dichotomies, particularly when it comes to the simultaneity of beauty and horror. 

While his process is deeply rooted in research and experimentation, Jackson treats conceptual and physical anchors just as significantly. In ten new landscape paintings, Jackson brings together a seemingly disparate range of starting points, from the 1884 novel, Against Nature, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, which sees a French aristocrat leaving Paris for the countryside where he exploits natural resources to fuel his insatiable desire for luxury and beauty, to the motion-based and darkroom work of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, Jackson has created a series of unearthly landscape scenes that feature distorted perspectives and uncanny colouration. 

In recounting where the creative process started, Jackson says, ‘I am fortunate enough to spend my summers and some of the winter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; I have loved the mountains since I was a kid. This innate love combined with WG Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, Thomas Cole, and a career-long interest in the imaging of the American West, [as well as] reading Huysman's novel and the pandemic NFT/digital art hiccup made me also consider my history of printmaking and fascination with methods of photomechanical reproduction in the late 19th century.’

To interrogate the complexities of authorship and intentionally challenge the mythology of artistic genius, Jackson developed a semi-autonomous laser process to bring an otherworldly quality to his paintings. ‘I developed a reductive painting process using my laser that works in conjunction with bitmap files taken from CMYK colour separations. These files are also tonal so they allow the laser to etch the image on both high and low relief,’ he reveals. ‘This has been a long time in the making. The end result does not present itself immediately, which I think makes it successful so that one is just confronted with the image rather than the complexity of the process.’

Jackson’s combination of physical and digital modes of making is at the forefront of the new works. ‘These always have had to work in concert with one another. I strangely think in reverse, relative to the industries that I traverse with my work,’ he says. ‘In design, I work from the physical until it feels and looks right and then transcribe it digitally to produce the prototype. When it comes to art, I just try to be as present as I can in my daily life and when form, colour, material, and process come together, the digital aspect becomes how to keep all of the things I am thinking about in registration. I want digital and analogue to fit together perfectly so that we can regain our hands, which have seemed to atrophy.’

It has notably been a decade since Jackson’s last solo exhibition in New York. ‘My show in 2013 was hard and I took on too much in youthful naivety, Jackson reflects. ‘In the time since, I went and lived in Wyoming, moved studios several times and finally the pandemic all piled up to take up ten years. I have been showing consistently outside the US but for a number of reasons, not in New York City. I am older and have more faith in tomorrow. I will never know it all, but I know some, and what I know is fun and exciting and that is good enough. Accepting this has taken ten years.’

Matthew Day Jackson, 'Against Nature', until 1 July 2023, Pace Gallery, New York. pacegallery.com

Over the last decade, Tokyo-based techno-creative collective teamLab has proved the crowd-pleasing (albeit not always critic-pleasing) potential of the ‘immersive’, interactive art (is it strictly art?) installation. 

Established by Toshiyuki Inoko in 2001, the collective gained an international reputation when Takashi Murakami showed its work at his Taipei gallery in 2011. Since then, teamLab has created spectacle and wonder – often involving light and lasers or interactive digital simulacra of the natural world and the apparent dissolution of physical space – pretty much everywhere. It now has permanent exhibition spaces in Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore and Macau with more to follow. (Tokyo’s teamLab Borderless opened in 2018 and attracted 2.3 million visitors in its first year, making it the most popular single-artist museum in the world.)

Of course, teamLab is no longer the only player in the immersive installation space. Other artists, designers, galleries, and cultural institutions have noted that pulling power. (Signed by Pace gallery in 2014, teamLab also pioneered a new economic model for artists and art collectives. Much to Pace’s initial scepticism, teamLab insisted on charging for tickets to its 2017 exhibition at a pop-up Menlo Park space, a former Tesla showroom, in Silicon Valley. Charging for admission is what museums, not private galleries do. But teamLab’s work is not private-collector friendly so, it argued, ticketing was the only way to fund the works. The show proved a huge success and revenue generator. Pace, in turn, launched Superblue, its dedicated experiential art division in 2020 with a permanent space, for ticketed shows, in Miami and a new outpost set to open in Kyoto).

The trick for teamLab – now an almost 700-strong super studio or ‘art stack’ – is maintaining some kind of creative distance from other digital art makers. Its collaboration on a new production of Puccini's Turandot, at Geneva's Grand Theatre 24 June – 3 July 2022, is evidence of that creative stretch. 

The production is directed by Daniel Kramer, former artistic director of the English National Opera, and known for his radical updates of opera's canonical texts, including a collaboration with Anish Kapoor on a production of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (and a hugely ambitious, non-canonical and financially catastrophic version of King Kong). 

Kramer’s new Turandot is similarly iconoclastic. The story of a prized princess testing a stream of suitors is reimagined as a dystopian game show (for the record, the production has been in the works for four years, plotted before Squid Game made dystopian game shows a thing. It is, though, similarly gruesome. One of Kramer’s innovations is that ‘contestants’ who fail Turandot’s tests are not beheaded, as is their traditional fate, but well and truly emasculated).

Kramer met up with Inoko in 2017 to talk about how he might incorporate teamLab’s light and lasers into a new work before signing them up to work on Turandot. Adam Booth, the collective’s art director on the project, admits that it has involved a certain amount of creative negotiation. ‘He came to see us in Tokyo and there was some intense brainstorming, working out how we could participate and keep our own aesthetics and integrity. Daniel had his ideas and we had ours and we worked through that. It was a long process.’ And got longer. Given that productions of Turandot usually feature a 100-strong chorus on stage, a Covid-safe outing was out of the question. 

Despite the game show conceit, Booth insists teamLab was not enlisted to provide an easy spectacle. ‘When you say lasers, most people think of light shows and green beams but it’s not about that for us. We’re trying to make planes of light and three-dimensional shapes by overlapping different planes and creating moiré effects when the lights cross. It’s not a pop concert, we’re using them to express something very subtle and delicate.’

The Covid hiatus gave Booth and his team time to work out how they could create a fluid architecture, unbounded by the proscenium arch, in lights and lasers. The studio’s in-house architecture team, teamLab Architects, meanwhile, were drafted to work on scenography, creating a stark, rotating multi-level structure, the gender power hierarchy at work in the play – with Princess Turandot very much on top – made physical. Booth and his team use mirrors and LEDs inside the set to create an intense kaleidoscopic take on the unfolding psychic drama. 

They also worked with the legendary costume designer Kimie Nakano. ‘Daniel is this amazing, energetic character and he wants everybody on board with everything. And it created this really interesting mix,’ Booth says.

The Grand Theatre is also planning to screen the production for free, live in Geneva’s Parc des Eaux-Vives. Though he admires the democratising impulse, Booth says a lot of the power of teamLab’s work will be lost in translation. ‘Lasers are just not suited to being filmed.’

For all the high-tech wizardry involved, what teamLab does is meant to be experienced physically, in person, and preferably collectively. It’s a point picked up by the collective’s project manager Kazumasa Nonaka.

Nonaka is behind another, unrelated, Geneva outing for the collective. Opened earlier this month at Pace’s outpost in the city, ‘Existence in an Infinite Continuity’ is another series of installation pieces involving moving digital forms. These new works, though, have a rare, raw spareness. A number of works called Dissipative Figures use minute lines to map the movement of air around human bodies and birds in motion. They are simple but mesmeric and hauntingly beautiful renderings of the disturbed, energised air we leave in our wake. 

‘As an expression, it’s very quiet but what’s happening is very dynamic; you see lines almost exploding as the figures run or walk,’  Nonaka says. ‘We are known for these very saturated and dynamic colours but just the difference in thickness and direction of these black and grey lines was enough to show the three-dimensionality of the air that moves around the human body.’ And if they feel a little sketchy, in a good way, that’s because they are just the first take on what Nonaka says will be on an ongoing series. 

Clearly, technology has advanced remarkably in the 20 years since teamLab was founded, or even over the last decade, when it has been a real international force. But Nonaka says that technology has only really helped speed up the collective’s creative and production process rather than effect any fundamental changes in the nature of its work. Advances in sensor technology have changed the degree to which its installations can be interactive (‘Existence in Infinite Continuity’ is also rare in that it is not interactive) and for how many people at the same time. 

As for all artists and galleries, pandemic-induced shutdowns forced teamLab to look at how it might put work out on social media and digital platforms such as YouTube. The collective created a ‘participatory’ piece, Flowers Bombing Home, for YouTube but Nonaka admits it wasn’t hugely successful. And, he says, teamLab is taking a cautious wait-and-see approach to AR/VR and the metaverse. ‘We still believe in physical interaction in physical space.’

INFORMATION

teamlab.art
Turandot is at Grand Théâtre de Genève, 20 June - 3 July gtg.ch
Existence in an Infinite Continuity is at Pace Gallery, Geneva until 2 July pacegallery.com

There’s a painter at work in the street-facing ground-level gallery at Pace New York, visible to passers-by on West 25th Street. He stands in front of a sizable white canvas, pristine save for a single, sweeping black stroke that evokes a tyre mark, applied with a spatula that he still holds in one hand. His back is turned to us, and we are left to guess at his facial expression, but his assertive bearing and insouciant attire – a pair of jeans, sans shirt so his muscular back and shoulders are on view – suggest supreme confidence.

The Painter, Fig 1, as he is called, is one of twelve pieces (ten of them new) that Elmgreen & Dragset have included in their solo exhibition, ‘The Nervous System’. While the Scandinavian artist duo’s previous works have depicted a boy astride a rocking horse for London’s Fourth Plinth, and forlorn teenager seated on a fire escape, this is a man in his prime, a postcard picture of heroism inspired by old photos of Wilhelm de Kooning in his East Hampton studio. But their current show is not a paean to abstract expressionism: any impression of nostalgia is quickly disrupted by a smaller artwork in the same space, a pair of wellington boots (in patinated bronze) ridden with holes. ‘They’re a symbol of our pathetic efforts to protect ourselves from climate change, and how we can’t turn the tides if we’re not changing our behaviour completely,’ explain the artists.

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, 2021 by Elmgreen & Dragset. Photography: Elmar Vestner

We encounter more disquieting images as we step into the main gallery. A boy gazes out of a lightbox display that masquerades as a window. Earlier in the year, the artists created a similarly configured piece called Offline, a poignant reflection on pandemic living, in which the boy presses his hands against the perspex and appears to yearn for ‘something that can’t be found inside or a reality other than the one we find online’. The new work takes on more sinister tones, with ethereal blue skies replaced by a gathering storm. Here, the boy’s arms are raised, and his right hand clutches a gun. Its form is deliberately ambiguous, so one can read it as either a toy or a lethal weapon. Still, it’s hard not to see Boy with Gun and not immediately think of the onslaught of gun violence that makes the United States an outlier of the developed world. 

Boy With Gun, 2021, by Elmgreen & Dragset. Photography: Elmar Vestner

‘School shootings are for the most part a white male problem. If you look at the statistics, it’s white boys who are responsible for these shootings, which has to do with a feeling of entitlement,’ they say. They find it disturbing that boys are often expected to play with toy guns, rather than being taught to respect other people’s lives: ‘The mindset that results in violence begins to form really early in life. It’s why you should put in all the effort and resources you can to nurture the next generation in a different way.’

The artists’ commentary on the crisis of masculinity continues throughout the space, which also features three familiar characters: Bogdan, Kev and Flo from Short Story, an installation that was first shown at Berlin’s König Galerie. This time, Bogdan, a wheelchair-bound elderly man drifting off in slumber, is placed atop a black woollen rug designed by the artists. A Day Short of a Year, as it is titled, is covered with 364 white tally marks, perhaps pointing to Bogdan’s imminent demise or the end of an era. Kev and Flo are two boys on opposite ends of a tennis court, the younger Kev has evidently lost the match and lies exhausted on the floor, while the elder Flo clutches a trophy but appears despondent. Unlike in Berlin, where viewers could roam the tennis court freely, the court at ‘The Nervous System’ can only be viewed behind glass, forcing us into the same perspective as Boy with Gun and grounding our experience of the artwork in the current pandemic. 

We are reminded of the fact that we’re indoors, perhaps against our will. The effect is enhanced by furniture pieces within the show – some (such as a distinctively masculine ‘Ox’ chair and a long leather sofa, both by Hans J Wegner) carefully sourced to evoke the midcentury, others created by Elmgreen & Dragset. A second rug in the exhibition, evocatively titled Lost Memories, has seven circular holes that, despite their geometric precision, feel like bullet holes. An original travertine fireplace has elegant proportions, inspired by the artists’ visit to a public library in São Paulo by Lina Bo Bardi. But it comes, disorientingly, with a TV antenna and is etched with the words ‘The oracles are gone and lost are the gods.’ (Adjacent is The Kiss, a new sculpture of two intersecting jerrycans).

The Ox and the Snake, by Elmgreen & Dragset, featuring a lacquered bronze python coiled on an 'Ox' chair by Hans J Wegner. Photography: Elmar Vestner

The artists have created a table lamp as well, featuring a porcelain base of two gently intersecting spheres, which taper into two necks supporting light bulbs and a lemniscate-shaped white cotton lampshade. They were inspired by a Qing dynasty vase that they encountered at Taipei’s Palace Museum years ago: ‘despite its age, it reminded us of Félix González-Torres’ Perfect Lovers’, they recall. Unusually for an artwork, it is available in four colourways (each an edition of three): mint green, dove blue, millennial pink and eggshell white. They point out that the colours in fact reference edible pigments that are used to coat HIV medicines such as Truvada and Isentress – behind their visual appeal lies a painful history that we must not forget.

Coupled Lamp (Mint Green), by Elmgreen & Dragset. Photography: Elmar Vestner

This is a melancholic exhibition, a cautionary message in a city that, at least until the arrival of the Omicron variant, has been dizzy with optimism. As Elmgreen & Dragset explain, ‘the artist’s role is to go against short-term memory. This is one of the few tasks we have.’ In a world that seems swept away by promises of a brighter future post-pandemic, they wish to remind us that there are longstanding problems to be dealt with: among them the climate emergency, gun violence and toxic masculinity. We’d be wise to tackle them head-on, lest we find ourselves left with a pair of perforated wellies when the waters rise.

INFORMATION

‘The Nervous System’ runs until 18 December, Pace New York, 540 West 25th Street, pacegallery.com

Pace Gallery has unveiled its new London home at 5 Hanover Square with inaugural shows by New York-based artist Torkwase Dyson and late abstract expressionist legend Mark Rothko. 

Dyson’s Liquid a Place will serve as a dynamic inaugural offering for the gallery. On view from 8 October –  6 November, coinciding with Frieze Week 2021, the multi-media installation transforms one of the new gallery spaces with sculptures, activated by a site-specific sound piece.

The artist, self-described as a painter across different media, grapples with how space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by Black and Brown bodies. On 7, 9 and 11 October as part of Pace Live, Dyson’s installation becomes a stage for leading writers, poets, dancers and musicians, selected by the artist, to engage with issues of environmental racism, spatial liberation and sensoria. 

‘Working in London offers me the opportunity to lengthen my questions around human geography. This history/timeline of carving the earth, the construction of the canals and all the mechanistic infrastructure and architecture connected to it. And the River Thames’ history of docks and dispossession,’ says Dyson. ‘What is systemic world building? How do we separate planetary world building and issues of climate change and relationship/difference to the Western construction of the universal that flattens and disappears people? When I continue my research in the space it simply also opens up space to hold liberation strategies and recognise autonomy/self-possession.’

Elsewhere in the gallery, Mark Rothko’s ‘1968: Clearing Away’, offers a show of rarely seen paintings on paper created during the final years of the artist’s life. These works, developed during a time of ill-health and personal troubles for Rothko, mark a shift in scale from his characteristically monumental canvases to smaller works on paper. Though intimate in scale, these works are no less intense, meditative or intoxicating.

The gallery, previously home to Blain Southern, which closed in 2020, has been reimagined by Jamie Fobert Architects, the practice involved with Pace’s original London gallery on Lexington Street. 

Fobert has transformed the interior architecture of the existing building, creating versatile galleries across two floors. The levels will be connected by a new feature staircase rendered in black steel. ‘At the beginning of the project, Pace considered carefully the way gallery spaces should relate to workspaces within the new gallery. This became the generating idea of our work,’ says Fobert. ‘The positioning of volumes and connections, both horizontal and vertical, has created a sense of fluid movement through the building. Art spaces and workspaces are integrated, giving the visitor a continuous dynamic experience.’ *

INFORMATION
Torkwase Dyson: ‘Liquid a Place’. Exhibition: 8 October – 6 November 2021 Performances: October 7, 9, 11, 2021

‘Mark Rothko 1968: Clearing Away’, 8 October – 13 November 2021

 ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
5 Hanover Square
London W1S 1HE

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Adam Pendleton and David Adjaye have united for the first time for a two-person exhibition, on display at Hong Kong’s Pace gallery. New paintings from Pendleton will join Adjaye’s marble sculptures in exploring a shared preoccupation with identity: the works, playing with our perceptions, offer a subversive hint that everything isn’t as it first appears.

Pendleton’s new painting, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), considers the tension between language and representation with a juxtaposition of textures. A clash of layers of spray paint, pronounced brush marks, collages and photographs express an unease, resulting in a seemingly uncompleted work that resists a neat finish. Ends left untied emphasise the pressing need for resolution.

In the paintings, the words ‘We’, ‘Are’ and ‘Not’ are inscribed repeatedly in a confusion of configurations that raises infinite questions: Who are we not? Who is the not-we? What is not? The words, in refusing to remain in a discernible pattern, resist easy interpretation. The paintings, building on the foundation of Pendleton’s 2008 work Black Dada, which marked the beginning of his exploration into the fragmentation of language, show just how easy it can be to read multiple truths from language – showing, ultimately, the fiction of fundamental truth.

For Adjaye, it is the layering intrinsic to the formation of the marble process that reflects the gravitas of a cultural history. The compression of the marble, which leaves thick, letter-like veins on the surface, communicates in a different way; the ancient Egyptian forms his pyramid sculptures take links back to the innovation of the ancient African world. The independent forms, despite appearing immovable in their solidity, can be rearranged in a multitude of ways in an echo of the ambiguity Pendleton demonstrates with language.

The exhibition is the natural culmination of a relationship that began in 2016 with an exhibition Pendleton installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, a building designed by Adjaye. A shared concern with the politics of space and a passion for art and architecture naturally culminated in an exhibition expressing their mutual interests.

INFORMATION

’David Adjaye Adam Pendleton’, until 30 June 2021, Pace Hong Hong, pacegallery.com

ADDRESS

12/F, H Queen’s
80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong

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As one of the great pioneers of postwar American painting, the trailblazing artist Sam Gilliam has made a profound impact on American art throughout his six decade-long career. Starting in the 1960s when he began making works that both expanded and disrupted the principles of Colour School painting in Washington D.C., Gilliam quickly became known for his groundbreaking Drape paintings that saw stretcher-less lengths of painted canvas suspended from the walls and ceilings of exhibition spaces.

As a Black artist based in the nation’s capital during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Gilliam’s approach of redefining existing norms was not simply by coincidence. His re-envisioning of the art medium as a means of reflecting the major changes taking place in society is something he has continually explored over the years. This has allowed him to spearhead a new path that stems from Abstract Expressionism, but also draws from other facets of Black culture, be it the improvisational aspects of jazz, thanks to his childhood spent entrenched in the musical culture of Tupelo, Mississippi, or the influences of other personal heroes.

Gilliam, in fact, credits the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane for teaching him how to paint, saying, ‘It’s time that matters: listening and realising what happened with the music, my experience of sound established these references in painting.’

This month, the 86-year-old Gilliam unveils three new bodies of work at Pace Gallery in New York – his inaugural exhibition since signing with the gallery in July 2019, which also marked the first time he has been represented by a New York gallery in his career. Entitled ‘Existed Existing’ and staged at both of Pace’s locations on 510 and 540 West 25th Street, the expansive exhibition includes large-scale paintings, a series of wood sculptures that are drenched in colour and monochromatic paintings on Japanese washi paper.

Gilliam’s eye-catching sculptures take shape as pyramids, parallelograms and circles – elemental forms in ancient African architecture – that are made from stacks of stained plywood and aluminium, coated in paint. Inspired by observing the influx of African immigrants in Basel, during an extended stint while installing an exhibition there in 2018, the monochromatic pieces command a regal degree of attention.

At the core of the new show is Gilliam’s series of large-scale paintings, ranging from six by eight ft to eight by 20 ft in size, that explore the density and physicality of colour. Highly textured due to the mixing of sawdust and other remnants from around the studio into the paint as well as the application of multiple layers, Gilliam’s gestural splatters of paint create hypnotic fields of colour that are then suddenly interrupted by the artist’s hand, marks made by a palette knife and even traces of a garden rake dragged across the canvas.

These paintings pay homage to Gilliam’s heroes and heroines, including the late civil rights leader Senator John Lewis, tennis player Serena Williams and Beyoncé (in the titling of the works). They also count on his other established formal archetypes, such as Gilliam’s signature bevel-edged paintings – a technique of mounting that makes the works appear like they are emerging from the wall – that he began using back in the 1960s. Oscillating between past and present, in a state that appears as both liquid and solid, dense and flat, these paintings are an inspiring representation of the fluidity and inconsistency of time.

INFORMATION

‘Sam Gilliam: Existed Existing’, until 19 December across Pace’s 510 & 540 West 25th Street spaces

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‘I always like something in my work to be raw,’ says Arlene Shechet, walking ebulliently amongst 18 unseen works on the morning her solo show opens in Pace Gallery’s gargantuan new Manhattan home at 540 West 25th Street. The sun has just come out and she’s pleased with how her towering cast bronze sculpture, Oomph, 2020 looks on the new terrace of the 75,000 sq ft Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture-designed Chelsea gallery. It’s the first time the terrace is being used to present a work. ‘I always have some sense of bringing the inside out, and the outside in,’ she says. 

Shechet, visibly energetic, embraces the physicality her work commands. Her sculptures are made from enormous slabs of storm-felled tree trunks (the knots filled in with brass), hunks of glazed ceramic, cast iron and steel, but there is a warmth and humour to her work which at times gives way to almost anthropomorphic configurations that might be missed from some angles. ‘It’s quite muscular what I do. I don’t mean that it doesn’t have a lightness and a female presence, but making sculpture is a very muscular tough activity,’ she says. 

The composition of elements and unusual pairing of materials feel as natural as a game of free association, yet belies a serious, technical hands-on mastering of casting, carving, firing and building – and each piece could cause a hernia to lift. ‘There is a casual, not precious, way of assembling the works, but with a seriousness and purpose at the same time,’ says Shechet, who often works on six of seven different pieces simultaneously. ‘I like the feeling of precariousness – it makes you feel alive.’ 

Shechet, who works between her studios in New York’s Tribeca and Hudson Valley and likes to ‘use words as material’, titled the show Skirts, as a subversive recasting of misogynist slang. ‘I wanted a word that was both a noun and verb’ she points out, ‘so that it was very open and has a lot of associations and people can read into it what they may. I’m not regulating the viewer, I’m not regulating how someone sees the work.’ 

INFORMATION

‘Skirts’, 28 February - 25 April, Pace. pacegallery.com

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
540 West 25th Street
New York

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‘There is no other city like LA, which generates creativity for the entire world in so many modes,’ says Frieze Los Angeles executive director Bettina Korek. The California native may be somewhat biased, but LA has an indisputable pull – boosted by the thrilling new dimension that Frieze brought to the city’s cultural scene when it launched last year. This week, riding high off the spectacle that is the Oscars, the fair’s sophomore effort returns to Paramount Pictures Studios. Fittingly, the inaugural Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award for emerging LA-based filmmakers is set to be awarded at the fair. Also new in 2020, Focus LA provides a platform for local galleries aged 15 years or younger, with curated artist projects advised by Rita Gonzalez, curator and LACMA department head of contemporary art. But it’s the solo acts that are raising the stakes – here, we make a beeline for the galleries risking it all on one artist.

Avery Singer at Hauser & Wirth

At 32 years old, the Swiss mega-gallery’s youngest signing is almost certainly bound for art superstardom. Lauded for her forward-thinking visual vocabulary, Avery Singer combines digital and manual techniques with gesso paint to create works on canvas that meld abstraction and figuration, historical and contemporary narratives. The artist, who hails from New York, will present four new paintings at Hauser & Wirth’s stand (B14), flexing her affinity for art history and colour theory in works like Jordan (2019, pictured below), which takes 19th-century European painting and the notion of ‘the intoxicated painter’ as starting points.

Idris Khan at Victoria Miro

At Victoria Miro’s booth (B11), British artist Idris Khan is intent on hitting all the high notes at Frieze with a meditative display of new paintings, sculptures and works on paper, largely rendered in intense shades of blue. But it’s his suite of Large Rhythm Paintings, based on sheet music, that has us completely entranced: obscuring areas of musical notation with gestural passages of oil paint, Khan leaves select elements of the original visible. Additional works include the deeply personal my mother, 59 years (2019) – an abstract monument comprising every printed photograph he could find of his late mother – as well a series of White Wall collages, and a jesmonite maquette of his public art installation recently unveiled in London.

Calida Rawles at Various Small Fires

Various Small Fires (VSF) is making its hometown Frieze debut with a showing of American photorealistic painter Calida Rawles in the fair’s new Focus LA section. The artist’s surreal paintings – depicting her subjects floating or submerged in swimming pools – dive into topics such as colourism, intersectionality, and the marginalisation of black women. The fair presentation coincides with Rawles’ first solo exhibition, ‘A Dream for my Lilith’ (12 February – 14 March), at the gallery’s Johnston Marklee-designed space in Hollywood.

Ugo Rondinone at Galerie Eva Presenhuber

‘Like a diarist, I record the living universe – this season, this day, this hour, this wind, this kind of grass… this kind of snow, this sound in the grass, this silence,’ reflected New York-based, Swiss-born artist Ugo Rondinone in a cryptic statement. The enigmatic Rondinone is revealing little else ahead of his solo presentation at Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s booth (A10), other than it comprises ten small-scale mountain sculptures and one sun painting. Watch this space.

James Turrell at Pace Gallery and Kayne Griffin Corcoran

The American artist has the distinct honour of headlining a double bill of his own work across two galleries – Pace Gallery (B16) and Kayne Griffin Corcoran (B18) – including an immersive LED ceiling installation and works from James Turrell’s Glass series. The immersive joint exhibition was conceived to bolster awareness and raise further funds for his magnum opus, Roden Crater – a monumental public arts project that has been 50 years in the making in the Painted Desert region of northern Arizona. Sitting out LA this year? Pace Gallery is hosting a solo exhibition of Turrell at its London outpost (11 February – 27 March); additionally, a survey of his work, ‘Passages of Light’, is currently on view in Mexico until 29 March. 

INFORMATION

Frieze Los Angeles 2020 runs from 14-16 February. frieze.com

ADDRESS

Paramount Pictures Studio
5515 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles

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While a handful of Manhattan galleries have flocked south where Tribeca is emerging as a new cultural destination, it’s the international blue-chips who are banking on Chelsea’s staying power. The recent opening of Pace Gallery’s 75,000 sq ft headquarters, designed by Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture, cements the powerhouse’s presence in the city’s longstanding art hub with a multi-functional complex that disrupts the contemporary gallery model.

Boasting 16,500 sq ft of exhibition space across eight floors, the 25th Street building greets visitors with a gallery and a light-filled public research library on the ground floor. A sixth floor terrace offers panoramic views of the nearby Hudson River, with a 4,800 sq ft outdoor space protected by a multipurpose top floor reserved for performances, screenings and large-scale installations, such as Fred Wilson’s display of five Ottoman Era-inspired Murano glass chandeliers.

The collaboration between the gallery and Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture manifested as an organic process of experimentation from the project’s initiation in 2014, ranging from techniques used for exteriors to different floor materials, such as bleached oak or cement, to accommodate various artistic mediums and colours on the walls. For its first art gallery project, the New York firm blended tradition with ‘a modern silhouette’ to design a building that pays homage to Pace’s five-decade history of fostering cutting-edge artists.

Enrico Bonetti explained to Wallpaper* that the team initially planned to use concrete for the façade. However, the challenge to find good-quality concrete in the US and its impact on construction speed led to the discovery of two alternative materials. Volcanic stone quarried from Sicily’s Mount Etna – a resistant material with glossy surface – was used for the first time in New York, while aluminium foam covers three other exteriors and provides a sculptural coating with its dramatic punctured surface. Inside, a lighting system built in collaboration with Arnold Chan from London-based Isometrix Lighting Design is smoothly tuned to artists’ various preferences. ‘Our research showed most European artists prefer ambient lights while American artists use slightly warmer spotlights,’ said Dominic Kozerski.

The building’s inaugural exhibition programme reflects the diversity of the gallery’s roster. In addition to 10,000 volumes and Pace archives, the research library is reserved for smaller exhibitions, starting with Moroccan artist Yto Barrada’s abstract wallpaper and works on paper inspired by architect Luis Barragán’s books at his Mexico City home. The ground floor gallery does justice to Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures and traces the series’ evolution from 1920s through the 1960s.

Young painter Loie Hollowell makes her Pace debut on the second floor with mesmerising abstract paintings with three-dimensional touches and bold colour palettes. Third floor hosts another master, David Hockney, whose new 24-panel drawing, La Grande Cour, seamlessly stretches over two walls to orchestrate a vista of Normandy. Third floor exhibits late American photographer Peter Hujar’s intimate black and white pictures of friends and nature. Finally, the fourth and fifth floors are reserved for offices, showrooms, and private gatherings.

INFORMATION

pacegallery.com

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
540 W 25th Street
New York

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French painter Nathalie du Pasquier is more commonly associated with the Memphis group, the design collective which revolutionised design in the 1980s. However, Du Pasquier’s work has developed in a personal, intimate direction since the group’s dismantling in 1987, and moved beyond the playful graphic illustrations she was originally known for. 

This month, London’s Pace Gallery celebrates the artist's work with a solo exhibition of her recent paintings, drawings and sculptures. Titled ‘From Time to Time,’ the show explores the ways Du Pasquier has challenged the rules of representations of forms, and arrangement of objects, presenting a body of work that blurs the boundaries between art and design. The exhibit is also the first in a series of three solo exhibitions chronicling Du Pasquier’s work this year, with two shows following at the Camden Arts Centre, London, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. 

The exhibition features a series of abstract still lifes, studies of space presented as geometric landscapes in a palette of reds, blues and brown, with three-dimensional elements completing the canvas. There is also a small selection of delightful pen and pencil drawings depicting the same scenes, and the exhibition is punctuated by geometric, totem-like sculptures – a medium the artist has explored since 2011. 

The paintings range from bold, flat depictions to more delicate representations of space, interspersed by pen drawings that all together create a clear panorama of the artist’s visual world. ‘Through the representation, I learned about looking and transforming what I saw into a painting,’ says Du Pasquier. ‘The abstract work is a different kind of position. I become a builder, an inventor.’

Du Pasquier also worked on the exhibition design, conceived as an overall installation which transforms Pace’s London outpost in a dynamic, colourful environment focused around a bright red room and featuring lines of colour interrupting the white gallery.  

‘The paintings in the red room are traditional still-lifes representing abstract constructions, and you do not see them when you enter the exhibition,’ explains the artist. ‘What you see instead, is the recent work where I have composed abstract paintings, done in the last two years, with three-dimensional elements that show the scars of time. What I want to show here is this continuous shift from one position to another. It is in that movement that I recharge the dynamo.'

INFORMATION

’Nathalie du Pasquier: From Time to Time’ is on view until 29 July at Pace Gallery. For more information, visit the website

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
6 Burlington Gardens
London W1S 3ET

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Stepping off a bustling Mayfair street into Pace Gallery for the much anticipated preview of TeamLab's 'Transcending Boundaries', we are plunged unexpectedly into darkness. Hands trace along blackout curtains, until one gives way, and we are ushered into a large room filled with disorientating light and music.

We've travelled into a parallel world, or at least, a future version of this one. The rules of nature are different; butterflies glow neon, flowers bloom on demand, and, as TeamLab's founder Toshiyuki Inoko explains, 'In order for ideas and concepts to be expressed in the real world. It is necessary to have a physical material substance through which they are mediated. We are seeking to eliminate these boundaries.'

In the first of four rooms, the real world is left behind. A waterfall of light pours from the ceiling and across the floor, parting where gallery-goers walk. With the lightest touch of the hand, the water's direction mesmerically changes, turning torrents into syphons. Around this, a kaleidoscope of butterflies grows in number as more people enter the room. But they die when touched, 'serving as a reminder of the destructive side to humanity,' explains Pace London director Tamara Corm. When left alone, they dance to the soundtrack of therapeutic music.

In the second room, we are plunged once again into blackness, and for the first time, into silence. Unlike the preceding room, it's vacant of life, except for a panorama of rolling, tumultuous waves. 'It's almost like you're inside them, swimming under water,' Corm explains.

The calm after the storm, the third room is a small, square box overwhelmed by white light. It feels like stepping inside an Edmund de Waal installation. 'Digital technology allows art to break free from the frame,' Inoko explains, emphasising that despite the novel techniques and interactivity, the installations are still very much artworks. They're grounded in artistic heritage. In particular, they reference traditional Japanese art. Themes of flowers, cherry blossoms and woodblock waves are re-actualised for today.

At first, it seems there's nothing at all of note in the final room, until you see your sleeves lighting up and realise the artwork is being projected onto yourself. Stay still, and flowers will grow like ivy across your arms, chest and face. Move too quickly and, like the butterflies, they will shrink to nothing.

Visitors become playfully caught up with interacting with the installations, that how they're achieved seems quite unimportant. But afterwards the question returns and lingers. Inoko lets little on. 'The optimal technology is selected and developed accordingly,' he offers, cryptically. 'We do not think that technology is the most important element. We are interested in how art can be extended through the use of digital technology.'

INFORMATION

’Transcending Boundaries’ is on view until 11 March. For more information, visit the Pace Gallery website

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
6 Burlington Gardens
London W1S 3ET

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‘Contemporary art is struggling to address real events in the art world right now,’ claimed Gregor Muir, executive director of the ICA, two weeks before Frieze opened. As co-curator of the fair’s talks programme, he chose the theme ‘Borderlands’ in a bid to galvanise this year’s speakers into exploring mental, physical and political boundaries.

Witnessing oversized mens’ trousers, pink plastic, Barbie-style detritus and sculptures made of scaffolding tubes, Muir’s words resonate. There are always lots of gimmicks at Frieze, but there’s good stuff too and Universal Design Studio – the fair’s architects – and the galleries, have gone to great lengths to make this year’s fair navigable and exciting. At the Modern Institute, recycled corrugated panels from Glasgow’s Tramshed are used by artist Martin Boyce as effective backdrops, while Hauser & Wirth tapped into the vogue for recreating the artist’s studio with a chaotic, fictional space filled with works by 46 practitioners.

Applied arts headlined at Gagosian in the form of black and white ceramics by Edmund De Waal and at the Viennese Galerie Meyer Kainer artist Lucy McKenzie created furniture wrapped in oil canvases inspired by Ettore Sottsass and Memphis, and Adolf Loos. At Mother’s Tankstation, this year’s Frieze Artist Award winner, Yuri Pattison, evoked 1970s California with an installation that explores the workspace and communal campuses.

For the first time, Frieze looks back this year, to the 1990s. Fourteen galleries revisit seminal shows from what was an impactful decade. Galerie Buchholz has recreated the bookshop in Cologne where Wolfgang Tillmans first showed photographs pinned to the walls, while Thomas Dane’s focus is on Michael Landy’s exhibitions in warehouse spaces

German gallery Rüdiger Schöttle also looks back, to 1926 and the International Institute on Intellectual Cooperation, an advisory body that acted to unite a fragmented Europe (and of which Albert Einstein and Marie Curie were members). Visitors are encouraged to take a seat at a concrete table and discuss the pressing issues of the day. The first session was full – Muir might just be proved wrong.

INFORMATION

Frieze London runs from 6 until 9 October. For more information, visit the Frieze website

ADDRESS

Regent's Park
London NW1 4NR

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How much visual information does one need to discern another moving human? What is the relationship between man and machine? These abstruse questions yield surprisingly playful answers in ‘On the Body’, a new exhibition by Random International at the Pace Gallery in New York. Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, the founders of  the Berlin- and London-based contemporary design studio, showed six new interactive pieces from the past two years.

Arranged chronologically, the show highlights two of the firm’s latest projects: Fifteen Points, a robotic sculpture that executes a rather jaunty walk through LED lights; and Blur Mirror, a reflective work composed of tiny tiles that cloud the face of one’s reflection. For Fifteen Points, Koch and Ortkrass worked with the BioMotion Lab at Queen’s University to translate the data of the ‘average human walk’ into a mechanised movement. ‘We were interested in the secondary information one gets through miniscule changes like emotions or gender,’ Koch says. (Fifteen Points reads as male and appears to be happy, as far as robots go.) Blur Mirror is described by the pair as ‘very analogue – we manipulated the mirrored tiles to vibrate at a high-speed to give the appearance of a digitised experience even though it is a mechanical process’.

Other pieces in the exhibition evolved out of Random International’s collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor in 2010 and further explore the body’s movement. For example, Small Study / I (FAR) lights up in response to motion and its thick layers of lights and panels invite the viewer to interact with it on multiple sides. Conversely, Fragments, a grid of 200 square mirrors, physically tilts and turns to follow its viewers. As a whole, the exhibition explores light, shadow, motion and the human perspective in an up-close, personal way. ‘We like to create one-on-one experiences where the person has a very intimate encounter with the work,’ Ortkrass concludes.

INFORMATION

‘On the Body’ is on view until 22 October. For more information, visit the Pace Gallery’s website

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
537 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10001

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In the flamboyant heyday that was post-war New York, a 60-year-old Russian expat with fake eyelashes and a passion for headscarves was the artist of the moment.

Photographed by Cecil Beaton and Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Nevelson is now considered to be one of the most iconic and vital figures in the art world, regarded for her groundbreaking sculptural environments and her contribution to installation art, defying categorisation. Paving the way for the development of feminist art in the 1970s, Nevelson’s work challenged the taboo that only men’s work could be large-scale.

For the 26th time since 1963, and her Pace Gallery London debut, Nevelson's work will take over Pace Gallery with a show surveying her work from the mid-1950s until her death in 1988. Salvaging small pieces of scrap wood from old buildings and then nailing and gluing them together, Nevelson created sculptures which ranged from small assemblages to free-standing columns and monumental wall-based works, then painting them in a solid colour – most famously black or white. The artist purposefully selected wooden objects for their evocative potential, however after having risen to fame for her wooden sculptures, she also explored materials such as plexiglass, aluminium and steel.

In addition to the presentation of a collection of significant monochrome sculptures, the exhibition will also include steel maquettes the artist produced for public spaces, exhibited in Chicago and at Harvard University. Thames & Hudson will also be releasing a book about the artist next autumn called Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow by Laurie Wilson.

INFORMATION

Louise Nevelson will be on view until 16 July. For more information visit Pace Gallery London’s website

Photography: Courtesy of Pace Gallery London

ADDRESS

6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S 3ET

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David Hockney has done it again. Until 18 June, Pace Gallery in New York is showing ‘The Yosemite Suite’, a collection of the artist’s iPad drawings. Hockney visited Yosemite National Park in 2010 and 2011; as part of his continued interest and engagement with landscape, the artist has produced these works as a way of embracing new means of creation.

‘David has always been interested in the latest technologies. When the fax was new, he was faxing us all drawings. When the iPad was new, those of us who are privileged to be his friends were sent images from his iPad,’ says Douglas Baxter, the director of the show. And so the size of an iPad further facilitated a new way of working – immediate and even impromptu.

Hockney knew that these drawings could be produced as large prints and so calibrated each gesture and colour accordingly – transposing the scale from screen to print. In fact, this Yosemite series follows a previous set of iPad works done in his native East Yorkshire, where he captured seasonal changes. Pace showed these in 2014, as ‘The Arrival of Spring’.

‘David is an extremely visual person, who fell in love with the landscape of East Yorkshire during summers as a youth. Similarly, when he moved to Los Angeles he fell in love with the landscape of the American West,’ continues Baxter. 

Hockney now lives and works in Los Angeles. This is his fifth exhibition at Pace since 2009. 

INFORMATION

’The Yosemite Suite’ is on view until 18 June. For more details, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website

Images courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
537 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10001

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Opening at New York's Pace Gallery this week, 'Double Pendulum' is the first solo exhibition in North America for the Chinese contemporary artist Qiu Xiaofei. This show, in particular, is a true departure from Qiu's usual work, that has historically been more of a reflection on his past: a time warp, if you will. The show consists of a group of new works dealing with the ‘expression of psychological and cultural forces through art’ – and specifically, painting.

Using acrylic paint, Qiu appropriates palette knives, spray guns, brushes and other implements in an improvisational manner; giving in to and resisting the resulting sprays, drips and even the creation of forms. The art, which leans towards abstraction, explores the potential of form plus colour, and thus expresses what the artist calls ‘a social subconscious’.

‘There has been a kind of distant coolness in Chinese art, even when it refers to the West in style,’ says Arne Glimcher, chairman of Pace Gallery in New York. ‘Qiu Xiaofei’s painting is unique in China and spearheads a new generation of Chinese abstraction. Although his personal references are encapsulated in expressionistic color and enigmatic symbols, they are uniquely Chinese.’

The artist, born in Fujian, China, studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing from 1998 to 2002 and is a member of the N12 group of Central Academy of Fine Arts graduates, who began staging shows together in 2003. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and Doosan Art Center in Seoul. 

INFORMATION

’Double Pendulum’ opens on 11 March and runs until 23 April. For more details, visit Pace Gallery’s website

Photography courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
510 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

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Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has long received attention for his introspective and immersive images, which reveal time, light and atmosphere while being frequently embedded with art historical monuments and sculptural figures (such as of the revered Buddha). In fact, he has deemed his distinctive black and white oeuvre as revealing ‘one of the most abstract concepts human beings have created’. Now these mesmerising images – as well as his first video – are spotlit in a new exhibtion, ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Sea of Buddha’, which opened at Pace Gallery in New York this week.

On view is the latest rendition of his Sea of Buddha series, which Sugimoto first conceived in 1988 but realised over the course of 20 years. Also on show are five images from his iconic 1980 Seascapes series in which the horizon divides sea and sky in diverse locales and atmospheric conditions.

The Sea of Buddha series was first exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ‘I have always dreamed of producing this series in mural size prints,' says Sugimoto, 'so that the Buddhas would be depicted in life size.’ At Pace, each triptych measures a staggering 4 ft by 5 ft.

Unlike the overwhelming number of photographers who snap series imagery near instantaneously and on the spot, Sugimoto works at a far more measured pace. ‘It has taken me seven years to complete the body of work that is being presented at Pace Gallery,’ he explains.

Sugimoto's first video project, Accelerated Buddha, further reveals his penchant for exploring time. He both blurs and layers the images of Buddha, so that they appear to fade into each other at an ever-increasing pace.

The show is the latest in a spate of recent exhibitions that have reiterated the artist’s worldwide renown. This month, the Barcelona Fundación MAPFRE will also hold a retrospective, entitled ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Black Box’.

INFORMATION

‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Sea of Buddha’ is on view until 5 March. For more information, visit Pace's website

Photography: Tom Barratt. Courtesy of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Pace Gallery  

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
510 West 25th Street
New York, New York

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American artist and architect Maya Lin’s thoughtful exhibition at Pace Gallery’s Hong Kong outpost offers a salutary lesson in the power of simple and pure forms reflecting a deeper meaning.

Lin first made a name for herself as a student at Yale University with her design of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, in 1982. According to the artist, a love for the natural world and a fascination in the places between things run through all her work, whether architectural design or artistic installations.

In her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, Lin explores the natural beauty and form of rivers, utilising high tech geographical information to create an elegantly simple series of eleven works, two of which – striking wall sculptures – are on show for the first time. 

The first, Pin River – Yangtze, 2015, is a 5.8m-long sculptural installation of steel pins that form an outline of the Yangtze, the longest river in Asia. The second, Silver Pearl, 2015, is smaller (at 1.7m) but is the undoubted highlight of the show, presenting a bird’s eye view of the glistening Pearl River Delta as a molten abstract form in recycled silver.

‘Using silver, a precious material that also has a reflective water-like quality, presents these rivers as extremely precious and jewel-like,’ says the artist, who is working on a series that will incorporate all the major rivers of the world.

Other beguiling works on show include two marble sculptures, titled Disappearing Bodies of Water, 2013 – showing how over-usage of water has reduced the depths of Lake Chad and the Aral Sea.

INFORMATION

'Maya Lin' is on view until 12 March. For more information, visit Pace Gallery's website

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery Hong Kong
15C Entertainment Building
30 Queens Road Central
Hong Kong

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'The title of the exhibition is meant to express the abstract idea of the relationship between the works and the space, the viewers, and between the two different cultures of tradition and modernity,' says Chinese artist Liu Jianhua of 'Between', his new exhibition at London's Pace Gallery.

Shanghai-based Jianhua studied his craft for 14 years at the imperial kilns of Jingdezhen, where he learnt how to craft new contemporary forms using ancient techniques, transforming paper, leaves, bones and ink drops into fragile, minimalist sculptures that creep across the walls and floors.

The works on display at Pace include Trace, first exhibited at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, where a splattering of glossy black porcelain drips based on principles of Chinese calligraphy appear to trickle down the white walls; and the Untitled plates – a series of wall-mounted celadon discs that are tied together with a continuing thin horizontal line.

Timed to coincide with the 18th annual instalment of Asian Art in London, the show is Jianhua's first at the gallery, as well as in the UK.

INFORMATION
’Between’ is on view until 23 December. For more information, visit Pace Gallery’s website

Photography courtesy of Pace Gallery

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
6 Burlington Gardens
London, W1S 3ET

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TELEPHONE

44.203 206 7600

Robert Rauschenberg, the revered painter and print maker who also turned to assemblage and installation work, has never stopped astounding art enthusiasts, so it’s no surprise that Pace Gallery’s ‘Robert Rauschenberg: Anagrams, Arcadian Retreats, (A Pun)’, which opened this week in New York, is dedicated to the artist pioneering new methodology that combines the dye transfer process of continuous color photography with large scale paper (and even laminate) panels, and sees queues going around the block. Staged together with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the show marks the first time Pace Gallery has shown the artist's works since his death in 2008.

‘Rauschenberg galvanized the artists of the second half of the 20th century and contributed to the rise of every art movement of the sixties and seventies straight through,’ says Marc Glimcher, president of Pace. A case in point: the artist’s groundbreaking work of the 50’s and 60’s alone not only preceded Pop art, but also Neo-Dadaism. At the same time, Rauschenberg’s oeuvre also made a profound impact on both Minimalist and Conceptual artists.

What makes the works on view so extraordinary is that Rauschenberg’s water-soluble inkjet transfer process led to a fluid painterly appearance. Such pivotal examples as the artist’s 1996 piece,  ‘Fusion (Anagram)’ which stretches more than twelve feet in width, practically envelops the viewer with disparate images ranging from bottles of Pepsi, bicycle wheels and electric light bulbs that seem lost in a haze.  It’s that notion of capturing out-of-the-blue elements, such as bags of balloons and Grecian sculptures that leave the viewer searching for yet more recognizable objects.

It’s a wonderful precursor to the Tate Modern’s Rauschenberg retrospective next year – the institution’s first highlighting of the artist’s oeuvre since his death.

INFORMATION

‘Robert Rasuchenberg: Anagrams, Arcadian Retreats, Anagrams (A Pun)’ will be open until 12 December

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
534 West 25th Street
New York

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Hong Kong is fast becoming a year-round cultural hub with an increasing number of intriguing smaller exhibitions filling gaps between the city’s blockbuster art auctions and fairs. The latest is a remarkable show by the inventive conceptual artist Song Dong, simultaneously hosted by the Ilse Crawford-designed restaurant-bar-art institution Duddell’s and Pace Gallery.

Born in 1966 in Beijing, and raised during China’s tumultuous Cultural Revolution, Song is renowned for his exploration of the ephemeral nature of modern society, often using exhibition spaces as an integral part of the artwork he creates.

Notable earlier works include Waste Not, a poignant installation at the Museum of Modern Art of over 10,000 household items hoarded by his obsessively frugal mother, and Eating the City, where visitors in several international capitals consumed Song’s miniature edible city in an intriguing commentary on hedonistic consumption.

With 'Sketch', Song draws viewers, diners and Duddell’s restaurant staff into a beguiling dialogue with his works by placing blue masking tape around the edges of the walls and staircases, with the art – a series of fish head and vegetable ceramic sculptures, photos and videos from Eating the City, alongside several ‘city’ sculptures comprising thousands of biscuits, baguettes and bagels. The edible work was ‘demolished’ by visitors who consumed it during the exhibition’s opening evening.

‘The tape is a simple object that creates a framework for the entire concept,’ says Song, who refers to himself as the ‘city planner’ when constructing the sculptural pieces. ‘It connects the people inside of it, making them part of the artwork itself. As the tape is also present at Pace, it connects the two exhibitions as one.’

The joint exhibition’s creative symbiosis is further reinforced at the gallery, with Sauce Painting created using international food seasonings as paint.

‘I want the audience to see things in their everyday lives as art,’ explains Song. ‘By having this exhibition at Duddell’s, visitors become part of the whole experience and are encouraged to go beyond their usual dining experience of socialising and eating to recognise food as art and become more mindful toward their daily lives.’

INFORMATION

'Sketch' is on view until 10 January at Duddell's; and until 7 November at Pace Gallery

Photography courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

ADDRESS

Duddell’s
Level 3
Shanghai Tang Mansion
1 Duddell Street
Central, Hong Kong

Pace
15C Entertainment Building
30 Queens Road Central
Central, Hong Kong

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Trained as a painter but introduced to weaving in Berlin in 2004, Canadian-born artist Brent Wadden decided three years ago to ditch paint entirely in favour of yarns. Each of his dazzling artworks is composed of individual geometric panels that are painstakingly woven by hand, on backstrap and floor looms from second-hand and leftover fibres. Stretched over raw canvas in graphic compositions, the abstract works that Wadden creates are characterised by their wobbly lines and errors. They are a celebration of the imperfect.

Citing First Nation, folk and Bauhaus textiles among his influences – as well as painting movements such as abstract expressionism – Wadden calls into question the hierarchies of media and disciplines with his work. In conversation with Nicolas Trembley earlier this year, Wadden commented,

'I liked the tension by having the weaving and the paintings in the same room, the language that existed or was created by having both of the things – something like oil painting, which most people would consider a high art or craft, and then the weavings which are like this lesser thing where the textiles could just be on the floor. People don't really respect them as art. It's more of a disposable medium and I wanted to create that dialogue in the gallery space between the two.'  

Opened last week at London's Pace Gallery, Wadden's first solo exhibition in the UK features five new site-specific works that respond to the scale of the space at 6 Burlington Gardens. At first glance, they appear to be two-tone abstractions; but on closer inspection the kaleidoscope of colour found in the leftover acrylic, cotton and wool fibres is revealed.

'For me, my work is about patterning, and rhythm, and always making a mistake at some point throughout it,' Wadden tells Trembley. 'It’s not a mistake if you purposely do it, but there’s a rhythm that happens and there’s a format in which you think. There’s a formula that I’m using in each piece but there’s always a mistake that exists in the work, which I allow to happen.'

INFORMATION
’How Long is Now’ is on view until 31 October

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
6 Burlington Gardens 
London, W1S 3ET

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As a minimalist, Korean-born artist Lee Ufan believes his role is to 'rearrange elements, rather than create something new out of the blue'. Using this philosophy, Ufan has generated paintings, sculptures and works on paper that possess a sense of tranquility, often made using simple repeated gestures and always with an emphasis on the importance of emptiness. 'Space means the infinite,' he was once quoted as saying. 'Buddhism teaches that being is possible only because there is also nothingness, and appearance coexists with disappearance.'

Having moved to Japan at the age of 20, he became best known for founding Mono-ha in the 1960s (Japan's equivalent to Italy's Arte Povera movement) but in more recent years, following a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 2011 and a solo show at the Château de Versailles last year, Ufan's international star has been rising.

Next month, two of the artist's major series, titled 'From Point' and 'From Line', will form the major focus of an exhibition at Pace London. Both series stem from the belief that lines and points are the basic units of the cosmos, Ufan applying a single hue to the canvas with simple repetitive brush strokes. In 'From Line', paint is applied in long, sweeping, drawn-out vertical rows from top to bottom, allowing the colour to fade as it cascades down the canvas. Similarly, in 'From Point', the paint is applied to the canvas in compact daubs and drawn out from left to right. With each new canvas, Ufan varies the starting point of each line, creating rhythmic, staggered rows.

Known for his meticulous approach, the process of application and absorption of the paint was made purposefully slow and ritualistic by Ufan, who made his own powdery crystalline paint from a recipe of ground mineral pigment and animal-skin glue. The result is a shimmering blue mixture that increases the level of friction between the paint particles and the artificial hair brushes. 'Something endlessly appearing as it endlessly disappears. Something receding endlessly as it endlessly approaches.'

ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
6 Burlington Gardens
London W1S 3ET

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