Split orbs in teal, purple, and fuchsia by Loie Hollowell

Art Basel

Past
Jun 14 – Jun 19, 2022
Basel

Art Fair Details:

Art Basel
Booth A8
Jun 14 – 19, 2022

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Above: Loie Hollowell, Split orbs in teal, purple, and fuchsia, 2022 © Loie Hollowell

Pace is pleased to detail its presentation for the 2022 edition of Art Basel.

The gallery’s booth will reflect the breadth of its program as well as its strong relationships with distinguished collectors, featuring 20th century masterpieces, contemporary painting and sculpture, and cutting-edge digital works that underscore Pace’s commitment to supporting its artists’ advanced studio practices.

For this year’s Art Basel, the gallery has been entrusted with major works by Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, and Sigmar Polke from significant private collections and estates. Pace’s booth will foreground the enduring potency and impact of these masterworks, which were created by some of the most important artists of the 20th century. Mitchell’s vibrant, frenetic painting Bergerie (1961-62) and Frankenthaler’s 1962 painting Yellow Games exemplify the artists’ virtuosic abstractions. Pace’s presentation of Picasso’s late-career painting Nu assis (1972), created a year before the artist’s death and held in a private collection since 2014, reflects the gallery’s long relationship with the Picasso family and estate.

Pace’s Art Basel presentation will showcase works by artists with ongoing projects in Venice: Huong Dodinh, Latifa Echakhch, Kiki Kogelnik, Lee Kun-Yong, Louise Nevelson, and Hermann Nitsch. It will feature vibrant paintings created by Kogelnik in the 1960s, including her 1964 work Outer Space, produced following her move from Austria to New York. This dynamic painting, which features floating silhouettes amid a sea of orbs and other geometric forms, speaks to Kogelnik’s unique engagement with and approach to the Pop movement, particularly the work of Roy Lichtenstein. The booth also includes elegant, minimalist compositions by Dodinh, who joined the gallery in 2022; new works incorporating concrete and acrylic by Echakhch; a Bodyscape painting by Lee, a leading figure of the Korean avant-garde who unites performance with other mediums; a black painted wood sculpture made by Nevelson in 1975; and highly experimental paintings by Nitsch, who died this year at age 83.

Spotlighting the gallery’s international contemporary program are new paintings by Loie Hollowell, who meditates on the processes and capabilities of the human body through her geometric abstractions, and Adrian Ghenie, whose semi- abstract, layered works are deeply engaged with history, memory, and social tumult. Green Pool with Diving Board and Shadow (Paper Pool 3), a 1978 work on paper by David Hockney, will also be presented in the booth.

New works by Kylie Manning and Maysha Mohamedi, both of whom joined Pace’s program in 2022, will figure in the gallery’s contemporary offerings on its booth. Manning’s painting More or Less (2022) features an ambiguous figurative scene rendered in warm pink, yellow, and orange tones. Mohamedi’s painting The Brother Framework (2022) highlights the artist’s masterful use of color in her illimitable abstract compositions, through which she references her personal history, everyday experiences, and key constellations in her own cultural matrix.

The gallery’s contemporary program will also be represented in its booth with The World of Irreversible Change (2022), a new six-channel, interactive digital work by teamLab, an interdisciplinary art collective that will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Pace’s Geneva gallery during Art Basel’s run, and Relatum – play of primitive (2015), an installation by Lee Ufan, who recently opened a sprawling museum dedicated to his art in Arles, France.

Pace’s presentation at Art Basel will include a new work from Jeff Koons’s first-ever NFT project, titled Jeff Koons: Moon Phases and presented by Pace Verso, the gallery’s Web3 arm. Jeff Koons: Moon Phases will make its world premiere in the gallery’s booth, where a mirror-reflective, stainless-steel sculpture of the Moon will be on view. This sculpture represents one component of the multifaceted project, which also comprises sculptures that will be installed on the Moon in perpetuity and NFTs that correspond with each sculpture on the Moon and the Earth. Like the other stainless-steel sculptures that will remain on the Earth as part of the project, the work in Pace’s booth features a small precious stone, positioned to indicate the location of the landing site of the Moon-bound sculptures. The sculptures remaining on the Earth can be understood in relation to Koons’s famed Equilibrium series and iconic stainless-steel Rabbit sculpture from the 1980s.

Presented by Pace Verso

Jeff Koons: Moon Phases

Moon Phase (Leonardo da Vinci) by Jeff Koons — Jeff Koons, *Moon Phase (Leonardo da Vinci)*, 2022, Non-fungible token, ID: #[TBD], Contract ID: [TBD] (“NFT Component”), Earth Component: Approximately 15-1/2" (39.4 cm) sculpture Moon Component: Approximately 1" (2.5 cm) sculpture

Pace’s presentation at Art Basel marks the world premiere of Jeff Koons’s first-ever NFT project, titled Jeff Koons: Moon Phases. Presented by Pace Verso, the gallery’s Web3 arm, the project comprises 125 unique works, each consisting of three components: sculptures that will be installed on the Moon in perpetuity, sculptures that will stay on the Earth, and NFTs that correspond with each sculpture on the Moon and the Earth. Centering on the Moon as a symbol of human curiosity, determination, and achievement, Jeff Koons: Moon Phases is the artist’s most ambitious work to date. The gallery’s booth showcases one of the mirror-reflective, stainless-steel sculptures depicting the Moon that will remain on the Earth—each of these works features a small precious stone, positioned on the sculptures to indicate the location of the landing site of the Moon-bound sculptures. The sculptures remaining on the Earth can be understood in relation to Koons’s famed Equilibrium series and iconic stainless-steel Rabbit sculpture from the 1980s.

The artworks within Moon Phases are each associated with people who have made accomplishments in human history. The list of names is universal, including individuals from various parts of the world, fields, and time periods, with Plato, Nefertiti, Artemisia Gentileschi, Andy Warhol, Gabriel García Márquez, Mahatma Gandhi, Sojourner Truth, Leonardo da Vinci, Ada Lovelace, David Bowie, and Helen Keller among them. These and other names will be individually displayed in front of the Moon Phases, memorializing the figures on the occasion of the Moon mission in 2022. In this way, Koons honors some of the greatest achievements of the past to inspire future generations.

With this project, Koons continues to explore themes of connectivity and acceptance, which have become hallmarks of his practice.

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Featured Works

David Hockney

b. 1937, Bradford, England

Mark Rothko

b. 1903, Dvinsk, Russia
d. 1970, New York, New York

Joan Mitchell

b. 1925, Chicago, Illinois
d. 1992, Paris, France

Bergerie (1961–62) is a pivotal example of Joan Mitchell’s work from the early 1960s, a time of exploratory creation for the prodigious expatriate painter. Having left the predominantly male-dominated art world of New York City for Paris in 1959, Mitchell created space between her known world and opened herself up to new means of abstraction. After moving to her Rue Frémicourt studio in Paris with her partner, painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, the two frequently traveled around France, finding respite on the Côte d’Azur and Corsica Island. Inspired by the coastal landscape, Mitchell’s works during this period reflect her state of mind and the color palette of her surroundings—primarily through rich blues, jeweled greens, and deep orangey-reds, which would remain constants throughout her work. In 1961, Mitchell and Riopelle rented La Bergerie, a villa in Cap d’Antibes, where they spent the summer with Riopelle’s daughters, Sylvie and Yseult. The artist most likely began Bergerie here or else reimagined the work upon returning home to Paris that fall. In her observations of the natural world, Mitchell seeks to capture its emotional impact, a retelling of her reaction to an environment. On this self-aware practice, Mitchell notes, “that particular thing I want can’t be verbalized [...] I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.”

Bergerie embodies the French Riveria coastline and mood, with imagery of this wild terrain imprinted into Mitchell’s recent memory. Complex and alive, the present work is a topological landscape, and at its epicenter is a winding knot of saturated color. The muted pastel and white background stabilize the picture plane while highlighting the emergence of sparring, vein-like brushstrokes. However haphazard they may appear, Mitchell’s compositions are well-controlled. Mitchell deftly shaped her immediate environments and landscapes from memory, and of this notion of aesthetic control, she once said, “I decide what I am going to do from a distance. The freedom in my work is quite controlled. I don’t close my eyes and hope for the best. If I can get into the act of painting, and be free in the act, then I want to know what my brush is doing.” In Bergerie, the artist carefully forms each brushstroke in response to the last and in anticipation of the next.

Helen Frankenthaler

b. 1928, New York
d. 2011, Darien, Connecticut

Painted during an exploratory period for the artist, Yellow Games (1962) exemplifies Helen Frankenthaler’s developing abstract vocabulary. It is a compelling example of her early 1960s work, as she established a signature style that later defined her oeuvre. Playing with the relationship between color and form, Frankenthaler considered the white background of her cotton duck canvas a key component of the total composition. She found it gave her work significant depth, with the open space allowing her painted forms to bleed into the canvas deliberately. In this work, ink-like swathes form a calligraphic image, outlined by slicks of oil and highlighting choreographed filaments of primary colors.

Fluid and controlled, the movement of shapes throughout the present work conveys an abstract expressionist modality through the application of poured paint, which removes the artist’s hand or brushstroke. Frankenthaler found this method—separated from traditional easel and paintbrush—liberating. It allowed her to create a work whose object and subject are solely painting. She did not want the tools of her practice to overwhelm the painting itself, expressing in the definitive documentary Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940–1970 (1973), “I used relatively few brushstrokes [...] since increasingly as I have been working, I didn’t want the sign of the brush or how the picture was made to appear.”

Elizabeth A. T. Smith, art historian and current executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, notes the significance of Yellow Games within the artist’s time of experimental development, seeing it as “more structured, emphatic, and declarative [...] there is no airiness of effervescence in Yellow Games; it is a bolder, more graphic statement in the family of other early-1960s works [...] In this respect it also extends features that began to appear in Frankenthaler’s work in the later 1950s.”

Jasper Johns

1930, Augusta, Georgia

Untitled (1991) exemplifies Jasper Johns’s singular artistic hand and mastery of combining autobiographical and art historical references. The artist often investigates pre-existing images by breaking them down to their simplest form, usually tracing an outline, flipping or inverting them, and filling them with crosshatching or other marks. This approach allows Johns to balance representation and abstraction. The artist has famously said, “Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it. [Repeat].” He has mined works by artists such as Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Holbein, and Matthias Grünewald, as well as his own personal history, including images of body parts and stamps made from objects around his studio. In 1988 he completed Montez Singing, a series dedicated to his paternal step- grandmother, who raised him until the age of 16. This series was also inspired, in part, by Picasso’s Woman with a Straw Hat (1936). The present work, which belongs to the Green Angel series, shows Montez’s eyes, nose, and lips in each of the four quadrants of the canvas. A mysterious, amorphous outline is layered on top of these fragmented features at the center of the composition.

In April 1990, the artist introduced the “Green Angel” motif into his practice. As in the present work, this motif has appeared in over 40 paintings, drawings, and prints, the first of which, Green Angel (1990), was the poster image for his 1991 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery Jasper Johns: Paintings and Drawings. While he had previously confirmed the origins of other references, Johns had grown increasingly disheartened by critics’ conclusions about his work. By withholding the source material for the Green Angel, he presented the viewer with an image they had to respond to directly, without prior knowledge or associations.

Some art historians have posited that the image references Hans Holbein’s Portrait of a Young Nobleman Holding a Lemur (1541), Auguste Rodin’s Torso of the Woman Centaur and Minotaur (ca. 1910), or Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–99).

Sigmar Polke

b. 1941, Oleśnica, Poland
d. 2010, Cologne, Germany

Exemplary of Sigmar Polke’s lifelong investigation of the tension between figuration and abstraction, Der Froschkönig in seinem Garten (1997) is a powerful, saturated work with a surprisingly narrative title. Roughly translating to “The Frog Prince in his Garden,” the title calls to mind the first story in The Brothers Grimm (1812) publication of fables, fairy, and folk tales.

The juxtaposition of the descriptive title and the abstract composition questions the boundary between figuration and abstraction, how they can exist simultaneously between the two modes of creation. Looking closer, both the original tale and the present work invoke the alchemical properties of transformation. Polke often experimented with unusual mediums, combining pigments and surprising elements such as arsenic, lavender oil, meteor dust, and snail mucin. This method required him to relinquish control over the outcome of the final image and left much up to chance.

Polke completed Der Froschkönig in seinem Garten in 1997 during his Laterna Magica series, which he began in the 1980s and continued through the 1990s. Laterna Magica refers to the 17th century optical invention used to project an image. The series comprises resin on transparent fabric stretched between wooden frames made by the artist himself. It also depicts ethereal figures, landscapes, and scenes from a variety of fairy tales, folklore, and children’s fables and exemplify his inventive style. Composed of jewel tone hues, reds, golds, greens, and blues dripping down the canvas, the present work is a masterful example of Polke’s examination of the transformative qualities of painting.