Art Basel

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Jun 11 – Jun 16, 2024
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Art Basel
Booth A7
Jun 11 – 16, 2024

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Pace Gallery Details Art Basel 2024 Presentation Featuring 20th Century Masterworks and Four Artist Projects at Unlimited.

For the 2024 edition of Art Basel, Pace’s presentation will be anchored by historical works from 20th century figures, including Alexander Calder, Adolph Gottlieb, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Richard Pousette-Dart as well as Sam Gilliam, Kiki Kogelnik and Pablo Picasso. At Unlimited, Pace is honored to present four large-scale projects by Nathalie Du Pasquier, Torkwase Dyson, Robert Frank, and Alicja Kwade.

Jean Dubuffet’s installation, Banc-Salon (1970-2024) will feature at the center of Pace's fair presentation. Exhibited in collaboration with Galerie Lelong & Co., Banc-Salon is composed of a low, meandering bench, installed below two hovering cerfs-volantes—kites. Inviting visitors to sit and reflect, this historically significant sculpture will upend the traditional architecture of the art fair booth.

Untitled #20 (1974) by Agnes Martin will also figure on Pace’s booth. This work, part of a body of paintings the artist made after a seven-year hiatus between 1967-74, is emblematic of Martin’s profound exploration of the visual potential of a single format. Martin's work is currently being shown alongside Alicja Kwade's sculptures at Pace's Los Angeles gallery, in an exhibition curated by Arne Glimcher.

Alexander Calder will be represented by two major works at the fair, including a 1939 mobile and a c. 1956 stabile. Two weeks ahead of Basel, Pace will partner with the Azabudai Hills Gallery to present Un effet du japonais—Calder’s first solo exhibition in Tokyo in nearly 35 years.

Pace’s booth will be highlighted by several artists represented this year at the 60th Biennale di Venezia, including Sonia Gomes, Peter Hujar, Robert Indiana, Beatriz Milhazes, Lee Ufan, and Yoo Younkguk. Beatriz Milhazes’ work is also the subject of a recently opened retrospective at Tate St Ives. Titled Maresias, the exhibition traces the development of the artist's practice over the past 40 years.

This spring, Pace announced global representation of Robert Indiana’s Legacy Initiative. In Basel, a late career masterpiece will mark the gallery’s first presentation of Indiana’s work. Four Diamond Peace (2003) is among a vital series of 24 paintings created in response to modern conflict, encouraging viewers to howl, shriek, scream, and shout for peace.

In anticipation of Robert Longo’s significant institutional shows opening later this year at Albertina Museum and Milwaukee Art Museum, works by the artist will figure on Pace’s booth, including a monumental charcoal drawing depicting Francisco de Goya’s masterpiece The Third of May 1808 (1814), widely considered the first modern representation of war. In July, a selection of new and recent charcoal drawings and studies by Longo will be highlighted by Pace at the second-ever edition of Tokyo Gendai. This October, Longo will also present a solo exhibition at Pace’s gallery in London.

A painting by Jiro Takamatsu will also be featured on Pace’s booth, following the gallery’s recent announcement that it will represent the influential Japanese artist’s estate internationally, in collaboration with Yumiko China Associates and Stephen Friedman Gallery. Takamatsu, a leading figure of the Mono-Ha (School of Things) movement, developed a minimalist visual language that was concerned with metaphysical ideas, and concepts related to time, space, emptiness, and potential. In September later this year, Pace will present its first solo exhibition of the artist’s work at its New York flagship gallery.

During the run of Art Basel, Pace will be presenting Kiki Kogelnik: The Dance at their gallery in London, marking the first solo exhibition of works by the pioneering artist in the English capital. Also in Switzerland, artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset will be showing Landscapes, an exhibition of new and recent sculptures that comment on nature—and our place within it—at Pace’s gallery in Geneva.

Two paintings by Emily Kam Kngwarray, the late preeminent Australian artist will be shown on the booth. A major exhibition dedicated to Kngwarray’s work will be presented at Tate Modern in 2025, which will be followed by a solo show at Pace’s London Gallery.

Pace’s contemporary program will also be highlighted by works by Gideon Appah, Yto Barrada, Nigel Cooke, Mary Corse, Matthew Day Jackson, Jules de Balincourt, Latifa Echakhch, Pam Evelyn, Adrien Ghenie, Loie Hollowell, Nina Katchadourian, Kylie Manning, William Monk, Yoshitomo Nara, Robert Nava, Hermann Nitsch, Paulina Olowska, Trevor Paglen, Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Michal Rovner, Joel Shapiro, Li Songsong, Mika Tajima, Lee Ufan, Hank Willis Thomas, and Qiu Xiaofei.

Featured Works

Agnes Martin

b. 1912, Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada
d. 2004, Taos, New Mexico

Untitled #20 (1974) is a distinguished example of the revelatory expansion of color that marked Agnes Martin’s return to painting in 1974, following a seven-year hiatus. The present work belongs to a group of six-foot-square paintings characterized by carefully delineated bands of pale blue and light red, each with variations in orientation and the number of horizontal or vertical bands of color. Both the palette and layout represented new directions for Martin: 1974 signified her development from the grid—the central tenet of her work through the 1960s—toward striped compositions. Martin’s process here began with her application of no more than two coats of gesso, over which she traced graphite lines in consistent intervals. This framework was subsequently washed over with paint, and at times, retraced over the painted surface, producing the appearance of soft lines.1 Untitled #20 was included in Agnes Martin: New Paintings, at The Pace Gallery’s 32 East 57th Street location in New York in the spring of 1975, Martin’s first show in what became a lifelong collaboration with the gallery. Other red and blue paintings from this 1974 body of work are in the collections of the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa.

Jean Dubuffet

1901, Le Havre, France
d. 1985, Paris

Jean Dubuffet’s Banc-Salon (1970–2024) was conceived as part of the artist’s Cabinet Logologique (1967–69) housed within his Closerie Falbala (1973), the monumental architectural work near the artist’s studios in Périgny-sur-Yerres, France, that stands as his largest sculptural achievement. Dubuffet’s discovery of techniques for enlarging sculptures from maquettes—which he would hand-sculpt with hot wire—in the late 1960s ushered in a period of prolific, imaginative production of architectural sculptures, during which the artist sought to create material forms from mental creations, forming a self-sustaining artistic universe in which the mind “feeds off its own fantasies.” [1] Dubuffet produced a Banc-Salon maquette in 1970, measuring six feet across, or a one-third scale model of the actualized Banc-Salon; Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei and his wife Eileen bought the maquette in 1971, a purchase that coincided with the beginning of their collaboration on architectural projects in 1970. The Banc-Salon belongs to Dubuffet’s Hourloupe cycle (1962–1974), a distinctive series characterized by intricate, interlocking shapes, first formed from the artist’s semiautomatic doodling while talking on the telephone, which evolved from drawings and paintings into ambitious sculptural and architectural installations. The Hourloupe cycle, the longest and most fruitful of Dubuffet’s career, includes other important architectural sculptures from this period including Le Jardin d'hiver (1968-70), now permanently installed at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Group of Four Trees (1972), commissioned by David Rockefeller for the headquarters of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. This Banc-Salon is numbered one from an edition of six in co-edition with Galerie Lelong and is based on the copy produced in 1970, on permanent display at the Fondation Dubuffet in Périgny-sur-Yerres, with the exception of loan periods for major exhibitions of Dubuffet's work including Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2016); and Dubuffet in the Rijksmuseum Gardens, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2017).

Jean Dubuffet, “Maquettes” in Jean Dubuffet: Writings on Sculpture (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2011), 47.

Robert Indiana

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

“I had a faint feeling of optimism that if we shouted and hollered and screamed enough maybe we might resurrect this very special thing called peace.”

— Robert Indiana

Over the course of his six-decade career, Robert Indiana embraced the vocabulary of highway signage and protest imagery to explore themes of American identity, personal history, and the power of abstraction and language, establishing an important legacy that resonates in the work of many contemporary artists who make the written word a central element of their oeuvre. Four Diamond Peace (2003) is a striking example of his Peace Paintings, a series he began in 2003 in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, which he witnessed firsthand. Through his use of text embedded within the visual language of 1960s protest signage, Indiana's Peace Paintings interrogate the notion of peace, or rather, “the absence of peace,” as it relates to both the legacy of the 60s and the aftermath of 9/11. [1]The bold, hard-edged composition and the diamond orientation of the canvas recall traffic signs, a motif the artist returned to throughout his career and which dates to his childhood, during which his father worked at a Phillips 66 gas station. “That Phillips ‘66’ sign,” Indiana recalls, “haunted most of my childhood [...] It was always an image which was very central in my whole life.” [2] Four Diamond Peace exemplifies the centrality of text to the artist’s practice. The words “shout”, “howl”, “shriek”, and “scream” strike dissonance with the peace signs they encircle, a formal contradiction that captures the turbulence of the decade from which the peace sign emerged—a time of war, civil unrest, and fervent social movements.

1. Ken Johnson, “Art in Review: Robert Indiana. Peace Paintings,” The New York Times, 21 May 2004.
2. Robert Indiana, interview by Richard Brown Baker, September 12–November 7, 1963. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Beatriz Milhazes

b. 1960, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Beatriz Milhazes’s Mares do Sul (2001), translating to “southern ocean” in her native Portuguese, is a kaleidoscopic paean to the vibrant coastline of her life- long home of Rio de Janeiro. Among fields of rich color layered with curvilinear forms and punctuated with floral and geometric structures, undulating sinusoidal lines along the vertical axis evoke Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx’s design for the Copacabana promenade, or calçadão; a four-kilometer-long stretch of geometric pavement mosaic along Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beachfront. In Mares do Sol, Milhazes employs her signature mono-transfer painting method, a unique form of monoprinting she has developed since 1989. The artist paints directly onto firm plastic sheeting before imprinting imagery onto canvas, a technique that, when repeated, creates multilayered yet smooth-surfaced paintings. The present work is characteristic of Milhazes’s opulent oeuvre of large-scale, mosaic-like abstractions. Describing Mares do Sul as a “nautical apparatus of the shifting gaze,” art historian Paulo Herkenoff explains that, in its multitude of references to her home country and its iconic shoreline, “This is Beatriz Milhazes’s baroque atlas.” [1]

1. Paulo Herkenhoff, “Vertical Waves” in Beatriz Milhazes (Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 2006), 150.

Art Basel Unlimited

Unlimited presents an opportunity for artists to expand beyond the traditional art fair stand to show monumentally scaled work. This year, Pace is honored to present four Unlimited projects with ambitious installations by Nathalie Du Pasquier, Torkwase Dyson, and Alicja Kwade. In celebration of the artist’s centennial year, Robert Frank’s personal set of The Americans will be shown in its entirety.

119810.07_FRANK_v01 — Robert Frank, *Indianapolis*, 1956. Presented in collaboration with Zander Galerie and Pace Gallery © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, from The Americans

Robert Frank

Booth U68

After receiving his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, the Swiss photographer Robert Frank embarked on a two-year trip across America during which he took over 28,000 photographs, some 83 of which would come to form his groundbreaking series, The Americans. In 1983, Frank printed three complete 12 x 16-inch sets of The Americans, adding an 84th photograph, a triptych. On view in Basel is the final third set, which was retained by Frank for his personal collection and has never been exhibited. Considered one of the most influential figures in the history of photography, Frank redefined the aesthetic of both still and moving images with his seemingly intuitive, off-kilter style. This September, Frank will be the subject of a major retrospective at MoMA, as well as a solo exhibition at Pace New York in November. The Americans (1954-57) is presented in collaboration with Zander Galerie and Pace Gallery.

DuPasquier_Image02_edit_ID — Nathalie Du Pasquier, *Cosi fan tutte*, detail, 2015-2023. Presented in collaboration with APALAZZOGALLERY and Pace Gallery © Nathalie Du Pasquier

Nathalie du Pasquier

Booth U31

Nathalie du Pasquier’s Così fan tutte (2015–23) will be exhibited for the first time at Unlimited. Du Pasquier’s practice of reimagining existing works—sometimes adding or replacing modular elements to create new arrangements from existing objects—is rooted in her environmentalism. “Forgive the scars,” the artist writes. “These wooden pieces have travelled through time.” Così fan tutte advances her work with single towers: using wooden blocks and everyday objects painted in vivid monochromes, she orders them in unconventional arrangements, creating dimensional and color contrasts in a process that has ties to her extensive work in painting three-dimensional abstractions on canvas. While incorporating reused elements is a fundamental aspect of her practice, the artist considers Così fan tutte the final realization of these structures. Così fan tutte is presented in collaboration with APALAZZOGALLERY and Pace Gallery.

Torkwase Dyson

Booth U7

Torkwase Dyson’s new, immersive sculpture, titled Errantry (2024), brings together geometric forms that reference histories of enslavement and architectures of dispossession, to further examine human geography and to propose spatial liberation strategies, in a rubric Dyson terms Black Compositional Thought. Conceived for Unlimited, Errantry is an architectural sculpture that invites visitors to interact with and walk through the work, as such confronting the ways space is used, imagined, and negotiated, particularly by Black and Brown people. This presentation coincides with Dyson’s inclusion in the Whitney Biennial 2024, where an interactive installation by the artist is shown outside on the Whitney's Floor 5 terrace as the inaugural Hyundai Terrace Commission. Dyson will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery in September. Errantry is presented in collaboration with GRAY and Pace Gallery.

Alicja Kwade

Booth U10

Comprising interlocking steel scaffolds that suspend two boulders in midair, Alicja Kwade’s ParaPosition (2024) is conceived as a framework that mediates ever-shifting encounters. The boulders appear to be held in place by compressive force; Kwade places one of these boulders just above a bronze chair nestled between two steel frames, underscoring the implications of the gravitational potential energy of the system. ParaPosition pays homage to Conceptual art pioneers while propelling the discourse forward, providing a fresh perspective on the relationship between objects and concepts. Kwade’s inaugural exhibition with Pace will be showing at the gallery’s Los Angeles space concurrent with Unlimited. Co-curated by Kwade and Arne Glimcher, this exhibition is the result of a longstanding conversation between the two, and places Kwade in dialogue with Martin—who will also have a painting featured at the fair. ParaPosition is presented in collaboration with 303 Gallery, Mennour, and Pace Gallery.

To inquire about any of the artists or works featured here, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

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