Together Again: October Monday by Arlene Shechet

FOG Design+Art

Past
Jan 20 – Jan 23, 2022
San Francisco

Art Fair Details:

FOG Design+Art
Fort Mason Center
Booth 204
Jan 20 – 23, 2021

Connect:

(opens in a new window) FOG Design+Art
(opens in a new window) @fogfair
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Arlene Shechet, Together Again: October Monday, 2021, glazed ceramic, powder coated steel, 20" × 14" × 10-1/2" (50.8 cm × 35.6 cm × 26.7 cm) © Arlene Shechet

Pace Gallery is pleased to detail its presentation at FOG Design+Art in San Francisco.

The gallery’s booth will reflect the breadth of its program, featuring works by Lynda Benglis, Torkwase Dyson, Sam Gilliam, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Louise Nevelson, Arlene Shechet, James Turrell, Leo Villareal, and other artists.

On view at Pace’s Palo Alto gallery concurrent to the fair is a solo exhibition of new work by Mary Corse, showcasing her paintings and light boxes. In 2022, Pace will present an exhibition of Louise Nevelson’s collages at its Palo Alto gallery.

Highlights for the fair include:

A new everdur bronze sculpture by Lynda Benglis titled Mad Hatter (2021), which engages with the artist’s longstanding investigations of material and form.

Torkwase Dyson’s 2021 tondo painting Above and Below (Bird and Lava) featuring wood and graphite elements. The dynamic geometric shapes of this work are part of a language of abstraction that speaks to the physical spaces inhabited by Black and brown bodies.

Prabhavathi Meppayil’s multimedia work l/hundred ninety four (2018), exemplifying the artist’s distinct craft-based process and approach to abstraction, in which she forges dialogues with complex histories of material production and the minimalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The artist will present solo exhibitions at Pace’s New York and Palo Alto galleries in 2022.

Louise Nevelson’s multifarious wall relief assemblage Untitled (1975), for which Nevelson utilized cardboard and paper to create layered abstractions that produce unexpected connections between materials and forms. Like her monumental sculptures, the artist’s wall reliefs engage with expressions of interiority, exteriority, containment, and overlap.

Arlene Shechet’s Together Again: October Monday (2021), a glazed ceramic and powder coated steel sculpture, is from a new series of work begun in 2021 and titled Together Again, which was also shown earlier this year at Pace’s Palo Alto location. Her recent ceramic works have been informed by a chance-based process, and she has cultivated an expansive approach to sculpture over the course of her career.

Mar Sergius, Rectangular Glass (2021), a new installation by pioneering California Light and Space artist James Turrell. This work is deeply engaged with Turrell’s ongoing investigations into the materiality of light and his engagement with the limits and wonder of human perception. The artist’s retrospective James Turrell: Into the Light is currently on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Leo Villareal’s Diffused Color (Large A) (2021), featuring LED lights, electronics, and custom software, which is a hallmark of much of the artist’s work. Incorporating vibrant colors that set it apart from other recent pieces by the artist, this work aligns with Villareal’s interest in the ways sequences of light create immersive visual experiences and multifarious sensory reactions. In 2020, the artist’s solo presentation at Pace Gallery in Palo Alto was featured on the collaborative digital platform 8-bridges, which serves the Bay Area art community. His work also forms an integral part of the cityscape in Bay Lights, which has set San Francisco’s Bay Bridge aglow since 2013.

Concurrent with the fair, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is on view at SFMOMA through March 6, 2022. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence offers a new perspective on the artist’s “anti- monuments,” bringing together recent sculptural and performative installations realized on microscopic and macroscopic scales that engage viewers’ sense of play and agency. Also on view during the fair, teamLab: Continuity at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco features a series of interactive and immersive digital installations by the international art collective.

Featured Works

Yto Barrada

b. 1971, Paris

Yto Barrada's work is intrinsically imbued with politics, often subtly suggested in symbolic visuals and instilled with a poetic sensibility rather than obvious directives and political positions. The artist's new series of large-scale textile works continues her exploration into dyeing processes using natural pigments and alludes to Frank Stella's Moroccan paintings—begun in 1964 and completed the following year. Each of the 12 paintings in Stella's series is titled after a city in Morocco. The geometry and brilliance of the fluorescent alkyd paints mimic the colorful tile patterns found during his travels there beginning in the 1960s. Citing his paintings in Barrada's titles, such as in the present work Untitled (After Stella, Sunrise I) (2020), these hand-sewn textile works similarly present luminous tones in alternating diagonal bands of color. Barrada's textile works are equally inspired by painters Mohamed Chebaa, Farid Belkahia, and Mohamed Melehi of the Casablanca Art School in the 1960s. After Morocco gained independence in 1956, these artists pioneered a style of North African modernism that belied traditions of French colonialist history, approaching abstraction through integrating materials and motifs of their local heritage and visual culture. For the present series, Barrada expands Stella's list of Moroccan cities, adding her hometown of Tangier in compositions using indigo, cochineal, and madder.

Lynda Benglis

b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Lynda Benglis is celebrated for her free, ecstatic forms that are simultaneously playful and visceral, organic and abstract. Drawing on the artist’s influential, decades long investigation into knotted forms, her bronzes evoke both the morphology and semiotics of the knot. Glistening and reflective, her new sculptures lend shape to feeling, harnessing the dreamlike qualities of liquidity and buoyancy to explore newer possibilities for expressing proprioception, the body’s ability to perceive its own position in space. Mad Hatter (2021) ties together several threads of longstanding interest in her practice: the pleasures of gesture and materiality, the powers of memory, the poetics of gravity, and the matter of sensation itself. She has connected her interest in knots to the experience of crocheting with her grandmother, who was a central figure in her early life. Benglis’s childhood memories—not just of experiences, but of sensations—constitute primary material for the artist. Her works strive to explore how kinesthetic experience subsists in memory. A whole repertoire of sensory memories informs Benglis’s new bronzes, which are not exactly knots—in the literal sense of her iconic sparkle knots of the 1970s—but remain indelibly entangled with the wider genealogy of knots in her work.

Mary Corse

b. 1945, Berkeley, California

Over the last five decades, Mary Corse has investigated perception, properties of light, and ideas of abstraction in her practice. Her pioneering approach to painting explores the medium’s capacity to utilize and refract light through subtly gestural and precisely geometric works. For the artist, the essence of painting addresses underlying structures of visual experiences and their position within space and time. Corse often emphasizes that her paintings are “not on the wall,” but instead suspended in a visual relationship between viewer and canvas. A selection of Corse’s work is currently on view at Pace’s Palo Alto location through January 29, 2022.

Torkwase Dyson

b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois

Though she works across multiple mediums, Torkwase Dyson primarily considers herself a painter, and uses geometric abstraction to create an idiosyncratic visual language that is both diagrammatic and expressive. In her painting practice, Dyson gradually builds compositions through repeated marks, brushstrokes, and washes of color, engaging with form, opacity, and texture to explore themes of Black spatial negotiation and liberation. In these paintings, Dyson contrasts the wood grain with smooth and rough graphite, piercing the tondo with a central acrylic form. Hovering between painting and sculpture, Dyson’s recent tondo works, such as I Am Everything That Will Save Me (2021), feature curves, trapezoids, and triangles. This language of abstraction speaks to the physical spaces inhabited by Black and brown bodies, such as the hull of a slave ship or the garret in which people hid. In Dyson’s words, “Thinking through the histories of Black liberation, these are the victories that fortify my being in the objects I make. It’s time for a new relationship with abstraction, an illegal abstraction developed out of the condition of a new world building toward liberation and revolution.”

Richard Learoyd

b. 1966, Nelson, United Kingdom

Robert Longo

b. 1953, Brooklyn, New York

Prabhavathi Meppayil

b. 1965, Bangalore, India

Indian Bangalore-based artist Prabhavathi Meppayil is known for integrating craft-based labor and process art, positioning her work in dialogue with a complex history of material production and Minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s. In her practice, Meppayil explores grids, monochromatic compositions, and serial repetition. With an emphasis on material, tools, and process, she engages with artists such as Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, and Sol LeWitt. The descendant of a long line of goldsmiths, Meppayil often incorporates various metal wires and marks made with goldsmith tools in her work. Situated in one of the oldest commercial districts in Bangalore, Meppayil’s studio is in a building that also houses goldsmiths’ ateliers. Her minimalist paintings often employ gesso paint, gold, and copper, and she uses traditional Indian artisanal methods to either embed or affix copper or gold to the surfaces of her works. In l/hundred ninety four, (2018), she builds out from the surface of the painting using strings of copper wire embedded in gesso panel, striating the surface and refracting light around the painting. The dynamism created by this elegant and yet simple composition invites the viewer to move around the work. Meppayil’s work will be exhibited at Pace New York and Pace Palo Alto in Spring 2022.

Louise Nevelson

b. 1899, Kiev
d. 1988, New York

Louise Nevelson is best known for her monochromatic, large-scale wooden sculptures as well as her multifarious wall relief assemblages. In Untitled (1975) Nevelson used cardboard and paper collage on board to create this dynamic abstraction. Spanning two critical periods of Nevelson’s career, this work reflects the artist’s intense interest in unexpected combinations of materials and compartmentalized compositions. This 1975 wall relief includes a vibrant silver half-moon segment amid its many layers. Like her iconic large-scale sculptures, the present work engages with expressions of interiority, exteriority, containment, and overlap. The work evinces Nevelson’s engagement with Cubism and Constructivism, as well as her position as a great innovator in abstraction. A selection of Nevelson’s collage works will be on view at Pace’s Palo Alto location beginning in February 2022.

Arlene Shechet

b. 1951, New York, New York

Arlene Shechet’s expansive approach to sculpture has led her to experiment with materials as diverse as plaster, porcelain, clay, and cast paper. In the last decade, 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. From a new series of work titled Together Again, begun in 2021, the present sculptures exemplify Shechet’s intense interest in madcap abstractions and unexpected material combinations. The title of this sculpture reflects 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. These sculptures harness the present moment through their seductively vibrant and chromatically rich nature.

Together: 1 p.m. by Arlene Shechet — Arlene Shechet, *Together: 1 p.m.*, 2020, glazed ceramic, powder coated steel, 21" × 19" × 12" (53.3 cm × 48.3 cm × 30.5 cm), ceramic 10" × 8" × 8" (25.4 cm × 20.3 cm × 20.3 cm), stand

Together: Pacific Time: noon by Arlene Shechet — Arlene Shechet, *Together: Pacific Time: noon*, 2020-2021, glazed ceramic, powder coated steel, 45-1/2" × 20-1/2" × 20" (115.6 cm × 52.1 cm × 50.8 cm), overall 16" × 20" × 15" (40.6 cm × 50.8 cm × 38.1 cm), ceramic 36-1/2" × 19" × 19" (92.7 cm × 48.3 cm × 48.3 cm), base

James Turrell

b. 1943, Los Angeles

James Turrell, a leading figure of the Light and Space movement, has long devoted himself to explorations of perception with a focus on the materiality of light. Influenced by the notion of pureness in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest works focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting light, building on the sensorial experiences of space, color, and perception. These interactions became the foundation of Turrell’s oeuvre. Exemplifying the artist’s ongoing investigation into the materiality of light and engagement with the limits and wonder of human perception, Ra-Ta, Elliptical Glass (2021) is a continuation of his Medium Elliptical Glass works. Light sculptures from this series are all named after the concepts, philosophy, people, and phenomena connected to the myth of Atlantis. Turrell is deeply interested in the myths of the lost culture of Atlantis, particularly in modern attempts to locate the physical ruins of the sunken civilization and understand its history and downfall. According to Turrell, the story of Atlantis can be understood in the context of contemporary issues. The Atlanteans were light-worshipping people with advanced technology, constantly warring with the rest of the planet and ultimately meeting their demise after searching for God-like power.

Leo Villareal

b. 1967, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Leo Villareal investigates the ways sequences of light create immersive visual experiences through his captivating installations and sculptures. Using custom coding, he creates works that explore the structures and rules of natural and synthetic systems, the phenomenological effects of light, and art’s potential to elicit multifarious sensory reactions. Diffused Color (Large B) (2021), a new work by Villareal, engages with these interests. Incorporating LED lights, electronics, and custom software, this sculpture is among the artist’s latest technologically minded experimentations focused on perception and subjectivity. The work also features vibrant colors that set it apart from other recent pieces by the artist. The present work speaks to Villareal’s distinct use of abstraction and cutting-edge code in his boundary-pushing practice.