Abu Dhabi Art

Past
Nov 19 – Nov 23, 2025
Abu Dhabi

ART FAIR DETAILS

Abu Dhabi Art
Booth S15
Manarat Al Saadiyat
Nov 19 – 23, 2025

PRESS

Press Release

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Above: Installation view, Pace at Abu Dhabi Art, Booth S15, Nov 19 – 23, 2025, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

Pace is pleased to announce its booth highlights for Abu Dhabi Art 2025.

Pace’s first presentation at Abu Dhabi Art since 2011 will focus on modern and contemporary sculpture, featuring works rendered in glass, steel, bronze, ceramic, aluminum, metal, marble, and other materials by Lynda Benglis, Alexander Calder, Elmgreen & Dragset, Robert Indiana, Alicja Kwade, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Arlene Shechet, Tony Smith, and James Turrell.

In the fair’s atrium, Pace will present a monumental 12-screen installation—titled Persistence of Life in the Sandfall, 2025 from the series Persistence of Life in the Sandfall, 2024- —by the international art collective teamLab, whose 17,000-square-meter art museum, teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi, opened this year in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Cultural District.

The gallery’s booth will also feature paintings, works on paper, and mixed media compositions by Nigel Cooke, David Hockney, Emily Kam Kngwarray, Beatriz Milhazes, Robert Nava, Adam Pendleton, Richard Pousette-Dart, Marina Perez Simão, and Hank Willis Thomas.

Highlights on Pace's booth at Abu Dhabi Art include:

James Turrell’s installation Light Chop, Circular Glass (2021), a mesmeric work that speaks to the artist’s enduring engagement with the materiality of light and space

A group of small-scale maquettes and a hanging mobile created between the 1950s and 1970s by Alexander Calder, whose dedicated museum Calder Gardens is now open in Philadelphia—and one of his most iconic works, Cirque Calder (1926–31), is now on view at the Whitney Museum in New York

A marble LOVE sculpture by Robert Indiana, who is the subject of a forthcoming book to be released by Pace Publishing in early 2026

A welded steel sculpture, Maquette for Sun Disc/Moon Shadow V (1976–79), by Louise Nevelson, whose major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France runs from January 24–August 31, 2026

Two recent sculptures by the duo Elmgreen & Dragset, who presented their first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Pace this fall

SunderState (2025)—a sculpture consisting of polished glass, a clock, and a patinated bronze base—by Alicja Kwade, whose solo exhibition at M Leuven in Belgium is on view through February 22, 2026

A new glazed ceramic, painted hardwood, steel, and gold leaf composition created this year by Arlene Shechet, who, as part of Art Basel Paris’s public program, recently presented a large-scale sculpture on the city’s Avenue Winston Churchill

A 2001 maquette for Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s monumental Plantoir sculpture

Lynda Benglis’s everdur bronze sculpture Lucky Strike (2024), a glistening and reflective composition that evokes a sense of movement, flux, and organic growth

Tony Smith’s 1962 cast bronze sculpture We Lost, which reflects the artist’s longstanding interest in geometries of the natural world and the formal possibilities of crystalline structures

Persistence of Life in the Sandfall by teamLab — teamLab, *Persistence of Life in the Sandfall, 2025 from the series Persistence of Life in the Sandfall, 2024-*, 2025, Interactive Digital Work, Endless, 8' × 13' 6" (243.8 cm × 411.5 cm), overall installed, [12] 55" monitors 2 rows of 6 screens Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

teamLab’s Persistence of Life in the Sandfall, 2025
From the series Persistence of Life in the Sandfall, 2024-

As part of its presentation at Abu Dhabi Art, Pace will exhibit teamLab’s interactive digital work Persistence of Life in the Sandfall, 2025 from the series Persistence of Life in the Sandfall, 2024- on a freestanding wall in the fair’s atrium. This 12-screen work, which chronicles the life spans of flowers and the shifting of sand, reflects teamLab’s explorations of what it has termed “Ultrasubjective Space”—the dissolution of the perceived boundary between the world of our physical bodies and the world of an artwork. When viewers approach the flowers in the work, they scatter and die. When they approach the falling sand, it breaks up.

Founded by Toshiyuki Inoko in Tokyo in 2001, teamLab is an international collective of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects. Known for its multisensory, immersive work, teamLab explores the relationships between humans and the world, encouraging new modes of perception through its pioneering, technologically advanced installations. In recent years, teamLab has presented solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; Amos Rex in Helsinki; TANK Shanghai; and many other institutions and venues around the world. In 2025, the collective opened teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi, a 17,000-square-meter museum in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Cultural District.

Featured Works

Alexander Calder

b. 1898, Philadelphia
d. 1976, New York

James Turrell

b. 1943, Los Angeles

Robert Indiana

b. 1928, New Castle, Indiana
d. 2018, Vinalhaven, Maine

Louise Nevelson

b. 1899, Kiev
d. 1988, New York

Oldenburg/van Bruggen

Claes Oldenburg
b. 1929, Stockholm, Sweden
d. 2022, New York

Coosje van Bruggen
b. 1942, Groningen, Netherlands
d. 2009, Los Angeles

Maquette for Plantoir (2001) is the intimate realization of the garden shovel concept that recurred across the span of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s famed collaboration, and was also produced at mid- and monumental scale. Oldenburg and van Bruggen met in 1976 while the former was installing Trowel I (1971) at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, where van Bruggen had previously worked as an assistant curator; the work became their first collaboration when Oldenburg took van Bruggen’s suggestion to replace the original silver finish of the sculpture with a bright blue. Maquette for Plantoir and the monumental Plantoir sculptures revisit the garden shovel motif a quarter century later, rendering the blade in a vivid red. The maquette offers a close-up view of the artists’ playful manipulation of scale and form, embodying the humor and creativity central to their collaboration. A twenty-four-foot-tall edition of Plantoir (2001) was installed on the rooftop of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for the duration of summer 2002. Permanent installations of the full-scale Plantoir in red are found at the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal. Full- scale Plantoir sculptures in blue are in the permanent collections of the Qatar Museums, Doha, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas