Yoo Youngkuk, Work, 1974 oil on canvas, 106 cm × 106 cm

Art Basel Hong Kong

Past
Mar 23 – Mar 25, 2023
Hong Kong

Art Fair Details:

Art Basel Hong Kong
Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Center
Booth 1D14
Mar 23 – 25, 2023

Connect:

(opens in a new window) Art Basel Hong Kong
(opens in a new window) @artbasel
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Yoo Youngkuk, Work, 1974, oil on canvas, 106 × 106 cm © Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation

Pace Gallery is pleased to detail its presentation for the 2023 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong. The gallery’s booth will showcase its global program, featuring works by international and intergenerational artists.

Pace’s presentation will include artworks by key 20th century figures Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Hermann Nitsch, and Robert Rauschenberg exhibited in conversation with works by David Hockney, Loie Hollowell, Kylie Manning, Robert Nava, Joel Shapiro,Arlene Shechet, Kiki Smith, and Rosha Yaghmai. The booth will spotlight Asian artists in Pace’s program, including Song Dong, Qiu Xiaofei, Yin Xiuzhen, and Zhang Xiaogang from China, Yoshitomo Nara from Japan, and Lee Kun-Yong and Lee Ufan from South Korea. During the run of the fair, Pace will present Zhang Xiaogang’s solo exhibition Lost at its Hong Kong gallery, on view from March 21 to May 4.

Booth highlights include Agnes Martin’s late-career painting Tranquility (2000), which the artist produced using acrylic and graphite on canvas, and Untitled (1995), a towering sculpture by Joel Shapiro. Composed of five bronze elements, this work reflects Shapiro’s longstanding investigations of form and movement as well as his intense interest in exploring—and occasionally erasing—the line between abstraction and figuration. A black-painted wooden sculpture created by Louise Nevelson in 1962 and two evocative abstract paintings by Hermann Nitsch, a founder of the Viennese Actionism movement who died last year at age 83, will figure prominently on the gallery’s booth. Pace is presenting the first planned posthumous exhibition dedicated to Nitsch’s expansive practice—spanning painting, performance, photography, music, and other mediums—at its New York gallery from March 17 to April 29.

Pace’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong will also feature a mixed media sculpture from the Surging Waves Chronicles series by Yin Xiuzhen, whose solo exhibition at Pace’s Hong Kong gallery continues through March 9; a new work from Song Dong’s Usefulness of Uselessness series; Arlene Shechet’s sculpture Together Again: November Thursday (2022), which features abstract forms in glazed ceramic and powder coated steel; and the bronze sculpture Sleeping Girl (2004) by Kiki Smith, who is presenting a solo exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art through March 19, 2023.

In the way of contemporary painting, the booth will include Light No.11 (2023) by Zhang Xiaogang, who is presenting the solo exhibition Mayflies at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai from March 4 to May 7 and a solo show, titled Lost, at Pace’s Hong Kong gallery from March 21 to May 4. Both exhibitions focus on Zhang's work created during the global pandemic. Pace’s booth will also bring together new and recent paintings by Qiu Xiaofei, Kylie Manning, Mary Corse, and Rosha Yaghmai.

The gallery will participate in Art Basel Hong Kong’s online viewing room from March 14 to 27, at (opens in a new window) artbasel.com/hong-kong. Pace will also launch an online exhibition on its website to complement its in-person presentation at the fair.

Featured Works

Agnes Martin

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

Joel Shapiro

b. 1941, New York

Untitled (1995), a towering sculpture composed of five bronze segments, reduces the more-than-life-sized human form to sharp lines and hard corners while retaining the dynamism of implied movement that activates Joel Shapiro’s celebrated oeuvre. Known for his innovative approach to figuration that examines the relationships between the human and inanimate, the living and sculptural, Untitled exemplifies Shapiro’s playful engagement with questions of what it means to be human. The artist, discussing his figurative sculptures, stated, “I am interested in those moments when it appears that a figure is a figure, and other moments when it looks like a bunch of wood stuck together–moments when it simultaneously configures and disfigures.” The present work captures this duality, reflecting Shapiro’s pioneering approach to balance. The fixed figure exudes a sense of motion, with arms raised as though in revelry, choreographed in just a way as to seemingly simultaneously defy, and succumb to, earth’s gravitational pull. The potential energy of Shapiro’s Untitled encapsulates his work at the intersection of postmodernist Minimalism and Geometric abstraction, conveying a broad range of emotions and interpretations through minimal shapes.

Lee Ufan

b. 1936, Kyongsang-namdo, South Korea

Alex Katz

b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York

Claes Oldenburg

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

Robert Rauschenberg

b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas
d. 2008, Captiva, Florida

36877_03_SMITH — Kiki Smith, *Sleeping Girl*, 2004, bronze, overall installation dimensions variable 44" x 55" x 2-1/4" (111.8 cm x 139.7 cm x 5.7 cm), overall, approximately figure: 10" x 28" x 2-1/4" (25.4 cm x 71.1 cm x 5.7 cm) stars: from 1" x 1" x 2-1/4" (2.5 cm x 2.5 cm x 5.7 cm) to 3-1/2" x 3-1/2" x 2-1/4" (8.9 cm x 8.9 cm x 5.7 cm), each

Kiki Smith

b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany

Kiki Smith’s interest in natural themes has extended to imagery of the cosmos throughout much of her oeuvre. Her practice has continuously investigated spirituality, mythology, and mortality, often concerning contrasts and similarities existing between the human condition and the natural world.

In the early 2000s, Smith became more interested in the female form, and her exploration extended to the celestial sphere. Sleeping Girl (2004) shows an adolescent girl asleep, floating in a field of stars. She is at one with the cosmos, becoming a star or constellation herself in her dreamlike state. Smith is an avid believer in astrology and the influence of the moon, stars, and planets on human experience, and by placing her protagonist in the stellar realm, she dissolves the boundary between physicality and spirituality, humanity and nature. Smith revisited the theme of sleeping women in many other sculptures, including Woman Sleeping (2003), Sleeping in a Thicket (2005), and Rest Upon (2009), as well as numerous works on paper.

Louise Nevelson

b. 1899, Kiev
d. 1988, New York

Louise Nevelson’s Untitled (1962), painted in her signature black, contains the trademark confluence of angular planes and curvilinear shapes that are the hallmarks of her acclaimed practice. Inspired by the Cubist innovations of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Nevelson reimagined painterly Cubism in the sculptural plane. The artist began working with salvaged wood in the early 1940s, a decision which liberated her from the medium employed by most of her peers—welded metal—and her use of found material allowed for spontaneity within her process. She was inspired by the immediacy of discarded wood, stating: “You can’t just put pieces of wood together, they have to relate to each other like humans.” Nevelson’s oeuvre is dominated by monochromatic sculpture, first executed in black and later white beginning in 1959, after which time the artist vacillated between the two, each hue bearing important metaphysical and visual resonance for Nevelson. While her white sculptures metaphorically employ the light of dawn, Nevelson’s black sculptures absorb light and enfold their key elements in mystery. Nevelson said of her black sculptures: “If you paint a thing black...it takes on a whole different dimension...black invites different forms. For me, the black contains the silhouette, the essence of the universe.” Untitled is a monumental testament to Nevelson’s mastery of the luminescence of darkness.

Loie Hollowell

b. 1983, Woodland, California

Max Ernst

b. 1891, Brühl, Germany
d. 1976, Paris, France

Kylie Manning

b. 1983, Juneau, Alaska

Qiu Xiaofei

b. 1977, Harbin, China

Mary Corse

b. 1945, Berkeley, California

Zhang Xiaogang

b. 1958, Kunming, Yunnan Province, China

Zhang Xiaogang navigates the fraught terrain of post-Cultural Revolution China through paintings that question the construction of memory and the polemics of forgetting. Zhang studied art during the Cultural Revolution and came to prominence after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre amid the new wave of artists breaking from tradition. Zhang adopted tendencies from painters such as El Greco and René Magritte but developed a unique style that employs figurative content in his existential approach to life in contemporary China. A motif in his work, the exposed lightbulb, first appeared in Zhang’s 2003 painting Amnesia and Memory no. 21 and emerged from his constant excavation of his past and his attention to his dreams, which he believes reveal images of his personal and familial history. The lightbulb evokes a deeper history for the artist, who recalls his father installing exposed lightbulbs with long cords in his childhood home.

“I’ve been thinking why I have to draw light bulbs. No matter how many I’ve drawn, I can never get enough of them...” Zhang explains. In his recent work, Light No.11 (2022), a new iteration of the lightbulb appears. It is recessed into the ceiling, casting shadows down the sides of the shower stall. No electrical cord is visible in this version, and instead, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the sparse shower stall layout with the curtain drawn back to reveal three bottles on a shelf and a pink bag on the floor. The empty room and cool tones used to make the painting evoke a sense of mystery as to the circumstances of the scene portrayed.

Virginia Jaramillo

b. 1939, El Paso, Texas

Wifredo Lam

b. 1902, Sagua La Grande, Cuba
d. 1982, Paris, France

Yin Xiuzhen

b. 1963, Beijing

Closely associated with Chinese history and tradition, porcelain has been the focus of Yin Xiuzhen’s practice in recent years, and its materiality has served as the impetus for significant variability in her sculptural work.

Through a nontraditional method of porcelain firing in her Wall Instrument series, Yin realizes subtle yet abundant variation in color and texture on the surface of the work while also allowing the spontaneity of this firing process to serve as a form of stimulation and dialogue. Ultimately, the original, smooth porcelain plates take on natural undulations, wrinkles, and cracks through this process. The artist also embeds fragments of worn clothes within these pieces, which reveals parts of the clothing within demarcations in the porcelain surfaces. In encompassing the experiences of those who previously wore these clothes, the works mimic a skin-like surface, creating psychological cues and evoking sensory perception from the viewers while acting as poignant carriers of memories.

Arlene Shechet

b. 1951, New York

In the last decade, Arlene Shechet has worked extensively with ceramics, engaging in the delights of a chance-based process that allows her to manipulate materials by casting, painting, firing, carving, and stacking clay with no predetermined end. Her dynamic and technically demanding glazing method produces seductive, textured surfaces that belie their dense solidity. From a new series titled Together Again, begun in 2021, the present sculpture exemplifies Shechet’s interest in madcap abstractions and unexpected material combinations. The titles of these sculptures reflect the marking of time during their creation—a naming system alluding to the medieval Book of Hours. In the same way that a Book of Hours delineated the seasons of harvest, spirituality, and celebration through richly decorated manuscript pages, Shechet—who views color as a “lifeforce”—finds in these sculptural pieces innovative ways to express the abstractness and subjectivity of emotional experience through time and form. Together Again: November Thursday (2022) refers to the day the sculpture was begun; though titled to reflect the passage of time, the present work also harnesses a specific moment through its vibrant, rich, and tactile nature.

Robert Nava

b. 1985, East Chicago, Indiana

85307_MOHAMEDI_v01_e-High Resolution — 300 dpi_ — Maysha Mohamedi, *Finger Voices*, 2023, oil on canvas, 71" × 61" × 1-1/2" (180.3 cm × 154.9 cm × 3.8 cm)

Maysha Mohamedi

b. 1980, Los Angeles

Song Dong

b. 1966, Beijing, China

Nigel Cooke

b. 1973, Manchester, United Kingdom

Hank Willis Thomas

b. 1976, Plainfield, New Jersey

Torkwase Dyson

b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois

Lee Kun-Yong

b. 1942, Sariwon, Korea

Rosha Yaghmai

b. 1978, Santa Monica

Rosha Yaghmai’s new painting Afterimage, Waves (2023) is a continuation of her Afterimages series, a body of work begun in 2021 that explores themes of personal history and dislocation through multilayered compositions. Informed by the fantastic landscapes of the Persian miniatures displayed in her childhood home, Yaghmai explores the dissembling of myth and history as they are represented in these works of art. Her dark, luminescent “afterimages” obscure and abstract the miniature in order to investigate the processes of distortion, estrangement, and assimilation of inheritance. In these works, Yaghmai removes the historical figures from her source material, abstracting and zooming in on the landscapes of the miniatures. Through this process, her painting practice favors distortion over representation. Invoking the aesthetics of lenticular prints—a process which uses special lenses to produce the illusion of depth—Yaghmai layers painted organza to create depth and moiré patterns within the enhanced scenes. In the present work, shadowy forms in rich reds, blues, and greens are distorted as though seen through a blurred lens. Afterimage, Waves seeks to unearth hidden histories and esoteric knowledge.

Hermann Nitsch

b. 1938, Vienna
d. 2022

Hermann Nitsch’s Schüttbild (2014) takes its name from the German schütteln (verb: to shake, vibrate, agitate; to jolt or toss); composed of animal blood collected from performative and ritualistic slaughter, the painting evokes the violent saturnalia that characterizes his oeuvre. A founding member of the Viennese Actionists, Nitsch’s elaborately choreographed actions comprised the Das Orgian Mysterien Theater (The Orgies Mysteries Theater)— more than 100 actions that involved components ranging from macabre to sexual to hysterical. The Orgies Mysteries Theater’s Gesamtkunstwerk (a “total artwork,” a term canonized by composer Richard Wagner, a noted influence on Nitsch), the 6-DAY-PLAY (1998), took place in August 1998 and involved hundreds of performers—musicians and actors—and thousands of audience members at Nitsch’s Prinzendorf castle, in his native Austria. The artist described the event, which included blood, meat, intestines, carcasses of slaughtered animals, and naked human performers, as “an aesthetic ritual glorifying existence.” Alongside and within this bacchanalian revelry, 10,000 meters of canvas were used for action painting as the events of the performance unfolded. Schüttbild is evocative of this landmark performance work, which was restaged in 2022 at Prinzendorf Castle as a two-day event. In the present work, acrylic and blood are splattered on the canvas, congealed in sanguine shades of red and brown and containing traces of the artist’s hand visible in finger-painted lines. Citing influences from Greek tragedies to the Passion of Christ, Nitsch’s Schüttbild is an essential work in his body of paintings examining the artist’s interest in the intersection of art and pain.