Art Basel Hong Kong

Past
Mar 28 – Mar 30, 2024
Hong Kong

ART FAIR DETAILS

Art Basel Hong Kong
Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Center
Booth 1D24
Mar 28 – 30, 2024

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Above: Alicja Kwade, Mono Monde, 2023 © Alicja Kwade

Pace is pleased to announce details of its presentation for the 2024 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.

The gallery’s booth (#1D24) will showcase its global program, featuring a solo presentation by Alicja Kwade on the first day of the fair and then, in the following days, bringing artworks by 20th century figures—including Peter Alexander, Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Antoni Tàpies—into conversation with works by Mary Corse, Jules de Balincourt, Torkwase Dyson, David Hockney, Loie Hollowell, Jeff Koons, Robert Mangold, William Monk, Robert Nava, Adam Pendleton, Marina Perez Simão, Kiki Smith, Mika Tajima, Brent Wadden, and other contemporary artists. The booth will also spotlight Asian artists in Pace’s program, including Qiu Xiaofei, Song Dong, Sui Jianguo, Yin Xiuzhen, Zhang Xiaogang, Yoshitomo Nara, Lee Kun- Yong, and Lee Ufan. During the run of the fair, Pace will present a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Kylie Manning at its Hong Kong gallery, on view from March 26 to May 9.

Pace’s first-day solo booth dedicated to Alicja Kwade—who will open an exhibition of her sculptures in dialogue with works by Agnes Martin at the gallery’s Los Angeles space in May—will highlight new freestanding and wall-mounted sculptures by the artist. Kwade, who joined Pace’s program last year, often engages with scientific and philosophical subjects in her practice, raising questions about the structures and systems that govern and shape our daily lives. Her solo presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong will spotlight works from her Mono Monde series, in which she pairs—and, in some cases, stacks—blue quartzite orbs and lightweight Monobloc chairs. Bearing the weight of worlds rendered in polished stone, these commonplace plastic chairs can be understood as symbols of a flimsy, capitalistic system. Visitors to the booth will navigate around Kwade’s Mono Monde sculptures, which will be displayed in conversation with mixed-media wall-mounted sculptures she created in 2023 and 2024. Later this year, the artist will open her first-ever solo exhibition in Hong Kong at Tai Kwun.

Following the first-day presentation by Kwade, sculptures by several intergenerational artists—including Travel Bar, a 1986 stainless steel work by Jeff Koons, who is presenting a solo exhibition at Art Intelligence Global in Hong Kong through April 26; a black-painted, wall-mounted wooden work created by Louise Nevelson in 1985; a wedge-shaped urethane composition made by Peter Alexander in the last years of his life; a mixed media work from Yin Xiuzhen’s Surging Waves Chronicles series; an installation from Song Dong’s Da Cheng Ruo Que series; and a brass sculpture forged by Sui Jianguo using the 3D scanning data—will figure prominently on Pace’s booth.

In the way of contemporary painting, the gallery’s booth will feature a 1994 painting, titled Wheels Go Round, by Yoshitomo Nara, who has recently presented solo exhibitions at Pace’s galleries in Seoul and Geneva. A small-scale canvas by William Monk—who is presenting Psychopomp, his first museum solo exhibition in Asia, at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai through March 24—will also be on view, along with new and recent paintings by Jules de Balincourt, Lee Kun-Yong, Robert Mangold, Kylie Manning, Robert Nava, Marina Perez Simão, and Zhang Xiaogang.

Pace will participate in Art Basel Hong Kong’s online viewing room from March 22 to April 1, at artbasel.com/hong-kong, and the gallery will also launch an online exhibition on its own website to complement its in-person presentation at the fair.

Alicja Kwade

b. 1979, Katowice, Poland

In her solo presentation of new work at Art Basel Hong Kong, Alicja Kwade advances the explorations of earthly manifestations of space and time that have marked her career from the start. Kwade probes the entanglement of space and time to question humanity’s place within the cosmos with these sculptures and drawings. Works in this presentation juxtapose raw earthly matter with mechanical components and human-made materials, challenging their conventional applications. Through material illusion and conceptual propositions, Kwade’s installation reframes our understanding of the ways we regulate and order the natural world.

At the installation’s center are arranged a series of works from 2024, each titled Mono Monde. Each of the eight sculptures consists of a single, large granite sphere that either sits upon or is lodged within what appears to be a plastic patio chair. These works confront the viewer with a variety of stark material contrasts. Visually, the notoriously flimsy patio chairs defy the weight of the massive granite orbs; they do not warp or bend, but rather remain stolidly inert against the heft of the spheres. This appearance belies an additional material irony of the sculptures, namely that the chairs are in fact constructed of bronze and have been patinated to resemble plastic. Taken together, the sculptures evoke several interrelated symbolic registers. First, they continue a formal gesture seen across Kwade’s oeuvre, in which bronze casts of chairs whose styles evoke various cultural epochs— bentwood, Second Empire, Art Nouveau—have been loaded with large stones or marble spheres. Mono Monde offers a sly wink to the audience by choosing as a seat not a work of wooden craftsmanship, but the so-called “monobloc” chair. These mass-produced, plastic-molded, and stackable lawn chairs are ubiquitous features of consumer society, though they are known for their inexpensive functionality, rather than their appearance, comfort, or durability. Kwade’s decision to replicate the form of these plastic chairs in bronze, before concealing the bronze entirely under white patination, adds to the irony. Second, and with the “monde,” French for “world,” of the title in mind, the arrangement of eight of these sculptures alongside two additional granite spheres placed on the ground suggests an easy comparison with the numerical symbolism of our solar system: eight planets, the sun, and the recently recategorized Pluto.

Kwade’s Mono Mondes are in the lineage of her L’ordre des mondes series, a body of sculptures that comprise stacked chairs and spheres. These works pay homage to Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s landmark sculpture Socle du Monde (1961), or “base of the world,” wherein a pedestal with inverted text challenges the traditional concept of the world's foundation. In their essay “A User’s Guide to Entropy” (1996), art historians Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss point to Socle du Monde as a metaphor for a world that has been turned upside-down, describing the conceptual experience of encountering such an upended world: “We would lose our marbles there: signs themselves would become empty, flat; there would be smoke without fire...For the world to lose its meaning, it is enough to turn it inside-out like a glove, to invert the full and the empty.” [1] Kwade’s marble-like orbs symbolically rearrange Manzoni’s disrupted world, incorporating stones from quarries across the globe, including the Azul Macaubas quartzite sourced from Brazil seen in the present Mono Monde sculptures. An arrange- ment of Kwade’s individual chair-and-orb works similar to this Art Basel Hong Kong presentation was recently included in the exhibition Foundations: Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2023), situating Kwade among artists whose works bridge the terrestrial and celestial. The discrete Mono Mondes, anonymized through Kwade’s use of the plastic chair form and each bearing a planet-like orb, mark a new conceptual turn in her body of sculpture alluding to metaphorical seats of power.

1. Yve Alain-Bois and Rosalind Kraus, “ (opens in a new window) A User's Guide to Entropy,” October, Vol. 78, Autumn 1966, 45

Physical and metaphorical inversions are a hallmark of Kwade’s oeuvre; in both her sculptures and works on paper featuring watch hands, the artist subverts the utilitarian function of these tiny objects, instead using them as measures not of time but of physical space, and as art objects. These works point to the irony of claiming belief in human-invented systems like time: Kwade underscores the arbitrariness of constructs for measuring time, and here transforms these constructs into measures for physical space. “I started to use time as a metric system for measuring spaces, and exchanging clock hands for centimeters to measure space in time,” the artist explained in a 2022 interview. [2] Viewing time as a pattern connected to light, she found that reading the system differently transformed clock hands into a pattern resembling light or sine waves. Bearing likeness to 20th century Minimalist Sol LeWitt’s meticulous wall drawings, the material illusion of the manufactured watch hands is a direct contradiction to Minimalism’s ethos of truth to materials, a dichotomy the artist threads across her oeuvre.

2. Alicja Kwade, interview with Patrick McGraw, “ (opens in a new window) Alicja Kwade Isn’t Trying to be Timeless,” Highsnobiety, 6 January 2022

Memory, 2023, 155 missing hours by Alicja Kwade — Alicja Kwade, *Memory, 2023, 155 missing hours*, 2024, brass watch hands on cardboard, pencil, framed, 89.5 cm × 78.5 cm × 4.8 cm (35-1/4" × 30-7/8" × 1-7/8")

Memory, 2023, 301 missing hours by Alicja Kwade — Alicja Kwade, *Memory, 2023, 301 missing hours*, 2024, brass watch hands on cardboard, pencil, framed, 89.5 cm × 78.5 cm × 4.8 cm (35-1/4" × 30-7/8" × 1-7/8")

Kwade’s Art Basel Hong Kong booth takeover coincides with prominent global presentations for the artist. Opening concurrently with the fair, K11 MUSEA, Hong Kong will present L’ordre des mondes (2023), the largest work to date in this series, towering over 20 feet high and including 14 stone orbs. Recently opened at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands, Kwade’s solo exhibition Die Notwendigkeit der Dinge (The Necessity of Things) includes works in the museum’s interior as well as two monumental, site-specific outdoor sculptures, the exhibition born from the same conceptual schema as this Art Basel Hong Kong presentation. In May, Pace Los Angeles will open an exhibition of sculptures by Kwade in dialogue with a selection of paintings and works on paper by Agnes Martin, who shared Kwade’s interest in time and in regulating the world around her. This summer, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York will unveil their acquisition of Kwade’s tremendous outdoor installation LinienLand (2018). Constituting a powder-coated steel framework supporting planet- like stone orbs, this work is born from the same conceptual schema as the sculptures in Kwade’s Art Basel Hong Kong presentation, which explore humankind’s attempts to understand and order the cosmos.

Featured Works

Robert Mangold

b. 1937, North Tonawanda, New York

Robert Mangold’s Curved Plane Structure 2 (2020), painted on a trapezoidal canvas, centers on the formal possibilities of subtle variations in shape and non-traditional use of perspective. The implied movement of the lightly curved top and bottom edges of the canvas introduces the illusion of folding or bending, a visual trick typical of the artist’s oeuvre: as art historian Richard Schiff writes, “Art like Mangold’s stimulates an enhanced life of sensation and feeling. Through an emotional experience of its forms, it provokes an expanded exercise of perception and cognition.” [1]

1. Richard Shiff, “Luster without the Shine” in Robert Mangold: Plane Structures (New York: Pace Gallery, 2022), 13.

Marina Perez Simão

b. 1980, Vitória, Brazil

The opulent landscape in Marina Perez Simão’s Untitled (2024) pulsates with the energy of skipping stones: curator Diana Campbell explains that Simão pursues these “fleeting moments” of expanding vibrational force. [1] The artist’s myriad influences—from space travel to the ornate velvet curtains that frame Baroque masterpieces— coalesce here in lush, fantastical forms with overlapping and impossibly curved fields. What may be mountains or moons fold into one another, Simão’s richly striated brushstrokes giving way to the inherent luminosity that characterizes her oeuvre.

1. Diana Campbell, “Star Sailing: Marina Perez Simão’s Recent Work,” in Marina Perez Simão (Rio de Janeiro: Editoria Cobogó, 2022), 68.

Kylie Manning

b. 1983, Juneau, Alaska

Kylie Manning’s Fracture (2024), awash in steely greys and ominous purples, evokes the monsoon season in Hong Kong, pointing to the geographical specificity that the artist considers across each body of work. The title directly refers to a sense of refracted light, as though the scene is viewed through a rain-soaked window engulfed in hazy, diffused colors lit from behind. Fracture comes at an inflection point in the artist’s practice: always working between figuration and abstraction, she cycles through periods that gravitate toward each. Here, Manning ushers in her most recent turn toward abstraction, in which the familiar figurative forms in her work are drowning in gesture, flooded with marks that push between narrative, velocity, speed, and quietness.

William Monk

b. 1977, Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom

William Monk’s Untitled (rainbow) (2019–23) renders the fleeting meteorological phenomenon in an unexpected palette that intersperses the classic seven-color spectrum with shades of grey, deep yellow, and electric blues. Monk’s rainbow arcs over a valley, forming a bridge between two mountaintops that evokes transcendence, recalling the history of rainbows in art history and mythology as a conduit between heaven and earth. Untitled (rainbow) is characteristic of Monk’s oeuvre, which centers on surreal depictions of atmospheric events, including volcanic plumes and vapor trails set against luminescent skies.

Jules de Balincourt

b. 1972, Paris, France

After immigrating to Southern California from France as a young child, Jules de Balincourt found refuge in surfing and the surrounding neo-hippie subculture of the 1970s and 80s. Prior to his painting career, de Balincourt crafted ceramic drums and pottery which he sold at Grateful Dead concerts and the Venice Beach Boardwalk. “Fire on the Mountain” references the Grateful Dead song of the same name, as well as cycles of destruction and rebirth: de Balincourt’s work, which often taps simultaneously into the personal and universal, is underscored by the loss of his childhood home to the 2018 wildfires in Southern California, in which the only remains to withstand the fire were shards of his first ceramics. For the artist, painting becomes a vehicle for both catharsis and commemoration of this event.

Zhang Xiaogang

b. 1958, Kunming, Yunnan Province, China

Zhang Xiaogang’s Role No. 12 (2021) continues the artist’s practice of unconventional portraiture interwoven with art historical, political, and personal allusions. Role No. 12 belongs to Zhang’s Role series which, in concert with his Stage series, draws attention to the theatricality of the quotidian, here depicting the subject with a stool as his stage. The distance between Zhang’s figure and the yellow background is bridged by fragments of paper collage that evoke pieces of ancient murals while simultaneously appearing pixel-like, expressing notions of space and time and navigating the paradoxes inherent in today’s deluge of information. Zhang’s paintings transcend the existence of reality, introducing viewers to a virtual space shaped by perceptions drawn from literature and the imagination.

Robert Nava

b. 1985, East Chicago, Indiana

The winged protagonist of Robert Nava’s Rescuing the Heart (2022) is shaped by an amalgamation of the artist’s influences: a scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) depicting a fictional ritual heart sacrifice drew the artist back to his childhood spent with a loved one with cardiac problems, while the menacing two-headed figure is evocative of the bicephalous villain Eyedol in the video game series Killer Instinct (originally released in 1994).

This combination of real and fantastical forces forms the crux of Nava’s oeuvre, which often subverts good and evil: in Rescuing the Heart, the composite villain transforms into a benevolent hero, ultimately saving the heart, and in turn, a life.