FOG Design+Art

Past
Jan 19 – Jan 22, 2023
San Francisco

Art Fair Details:

FOG Art+Design
Fort Mason Center
Booth 206
Jan 19 – 22, 2023

Connect:

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

Above: Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Days), 2022 © Adam Pendleton

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

The gallery’s booth (206) will showcase the breadth of its program—with a focus on contemporary abstraction—featuring works by Adam Pendleton, Elmgreen & Dragset, Sonia Gomes, Arlene Shechet, Mika Tajima, Lee Ufan, Louise Nevelson, and other artists.

Adam Pendleton’s new silkscreen ink painting Untitled (Days) (2022), the largest work on view in Pace’s booth, will anchor the gallery’s presentation at the fair. Known for his use of historical and aesthetic content from visual and literary culture, Pendleton often examines the resonances of ideas from histories of social resistance and artistic production, including Dada, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. In Untitled (Days), layered abstract forms and linear flourishes coalesce in lyrical, fluid choreographies across the canvas. Pendleton’s resulting composition is at once balanced and frenetic, a visual paradox that speaks to the multivalent nature of his art.

Also in the way of painting, Pace’s booth will include Lee Ufan’s dynamic 2018 painting Dialogue, a work that reflects the artist’s unique approach to color and space. Lee, who recently opened an extension of his foundation in Arles, France, has said that one of his aims as an artist is to create highly abstract works that eschew realism and legible representation—Dialogue brings into focus Lee’s ability to infuse his ineffable works with philosophical import.

Pace’s booth will also feature a new mixed media artwork by Mika Tajima, who joined the gallery’s program in 2022. Titled Negative Entropy (TAE, Test Shot, Inner Divertor Operation, Norman, Cream, Double) (2022), this abstract work is rendered in cotton, nylon, polyester, wool acoustic baffling felt, and white oak.

Sculpture will figure prominently in the gallery’s presentation at FOG. Highlights include Arlene Shechet’s new small-scale work Nephew (2022), which features glazed ceramic, painted and dyed hardwood, and steel elements. Nephew’s idiosyncratic plays of color, texture, and shape exemplify the central consideration of Shechet’s practice: uncovering the expressive potential of materials and forms and setting them in motion. Next Sentence, the artist’s solo exhibition at Pace’s Palm Beach gallery, is on view through February 5, running concurrently with the FOG fair.

A wall-mounted sculpture by Sonia Gomes, who recently presented her first-ever solo show in New York at Pace’s 540 West 25th Street gallery, will also be exhibited in the booth. In Cristal 1 (série tela-corpo) (2022), Gomes uses acrylic, vinyl, crystal, assorted fabrics, and wire to forge otherworldly abstractions. Through kneading, twisting, and stretching, the artist grapples with the stories and memories rooted in her fabrics and other materials, imbuing her resulting sculptures with personal and political resonances. In her laborious process for creating these multimedia works, Gomes considers sewing akin to drawing: a means to produce gestural marks and compositional balance.

The duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s new mirror-polished stainless steel and lacquer sculpture On Target, Fig. 12 (2022) will also be featured in the booth. This reflective, wall-mounted work serves as an off-kilter bullseye, inviting the viewer into its central ring.

Contemporary sculpture will be presented in dialogue with a rare wall relief by Louise Nevelson, whose legacy looms large in the gallery’s program and the history of art in the 20th century. Through her tireless experimentations with materiality, shape, and space, Nevelson cultivated her own distinctive language of abstraction and assemblage. Nevelson’s Southern Shores XXXI (1968), a rare white painted wood collage wall relief, will be presented in Pace’s booth at FOG. This monochromatic work features abstract elements in frame-like compartments, a signature of Nevelson’s oeuvre.

Pace is pleased to participate in FOG Design+Art for the eighth time, the first since the gallery closed its Palo Alto location and consolidated its West Coast activity through a new flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in April 2022 and is presenting an exhibition of work by Alexander Calder—selected and installed by artist Richard Tuttle—from January 21 to February 25, 2023. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists.

Featured Works

84758 — Elmgreen & Dragset, *On Target, Fig. 12*, 2022, mirror-polished stainless steel and lacquer, 51-1/4" × 51-1/4" × 16-11/16" (130.2 cm × 130.2 cm × 42.4 cm)

Elmgreen & Dragset

Michael Elmgreen
b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark

Ingar Dragset
b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway

On Target, Fig. 12 (2022) is a new sculpture from Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, who together form the artistic duo Elmgreen & Dragset. Rendered in mirror-polished stainless steel and lacquer, the present work is both representational and reflective, drawing the viewer into the sculptural plane. Composed of concentric rings of vivid lacquer interrupted by mirrored bands with an off-center bull’s eye, the reflected image distorts the viewer’s body, fragmenting the reflected image. A stainless steel arrow pierces the sculpture just left of the bull’s eye but at the approximate center point of the target, representing a near miss; however, the arrow’s landing site would have been in the bull’s eye if it were centered. This optical deception introduces questions about ambition: what does it mean to miss your target if it was never aligned in the first place? Uninhibited by the missed arrow, the bull’s eye is mirrored, meaning that to directly confront this work is to become its target. Across their oeuvre, the artists create tongue-in-cheek sculptures that critique life under late capitalism and explore what it means to inhabit a body in the highly automated and polished contemporary moment.

Sonia Gomes

b. 1948, Caetanópolis

69094 — Lee Ufan, *Dialogue*, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 89-3/8" × 71-5/8" (227 cm × 181.9 cm)

Lee Ufan

b. 1936, Kyongsang-namdo, South Korea

39236 — Louise Nevelson, *Southern Shores XXXI*, 1968, wood collage on board, 36" x 24" (91.4 cm x 61 cm)

Louise Nevelson

b. 1899, Kiev
d. 1988, New York

Louise Nevelson’s Southern Shores XXXI (1968), a wall relief of wood painted white, embodies the artist’s career-spanning attention toward found objects and monochromatic white compositions. Nevelson was inspired by the immediacy of found wood—each piece possessing its own original history—and its allowance for spontaneity within her process. “All objects are retranslated—that’s the magic,” Nevelson explained. “It’s a translation and a transformation, both. When I pick up a piece to put in a piece, it’s living and waiting for that piece.” The artist first introduced white paint into her work in 1959 after working exclusively in black since the beginning of her career, Nevelson chose to challenge the constancy of her work by exploring achromatic versatility, writing that white was “early morning when you arise between night and dawn. When you’ve slept and the city has slept you get a psychic vision of an awakening. And therefore, between almost the dream and the awakening, it is like celestial. White invites more activity.” Nevelson felt that different forms, tones, and weights emerged when a work was painted white, significantly affecting the dimension it took on. In Southern Shores XXXI, shadows delineate shapes, defining the organic forms contained in a geometric grid; this confluence of angular and curvilinear shapes have come to be the hallmark of her acclaimed oeuvre.

Adam Pendleton

b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia

85070 — Arlene Shechet, *Nephew*, 2022, Glazed ceramic, painted and dyed hardwood, and steel, 23" × 15" × 10" (58.4 cm × 38.1 cm × 25.4 cm) Plinth: 32" × 23" × 23" (81.3 cm × 58.4 cm × 58.4 cm)

Arlene Shechet

b. 1951, New York, New York

Nephew (2022), a new work by the multidisciplinary sculptor Arlene Shechet, exemplifies the artist’s intense interest in madcap abstractions and unexpected material combinations. This tactile sculpture incorporates glazed ceramic, painted hardwood, and blackened steel, creating distinct and idiosyncratic components, lively textural interactions and contrasts, and organic forms. Resembling paint-soaked sponges, three glazed ceramic forms generate material ambiguity, appearing soft and malleable despite their rough and fragile medium. The amalgam of textures in the present work aligns with Shechet’s ongoing explorations of materiality within her practice. Consistent with her oeuvre of gravity-defying work, Nephew reveals itself to viewers as they navigate it from all sides, taking in its varied niches, crevices, and angles. Seen from different perspectives, the work shapeshifts and transforms before viewers’ eyes. 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.

83814 — Mika Tajima, *Negative Entropy (TAE, Test Shot, Inner Divertor Operation, Norman, Cream, Double)*, 2022, cotton, nylon, polyester, wool acoustic baffling felt and white oak, 55" × 42" × 1-1/2" (139.7 cm × 106.7 cm × 3.8 cm)(unframed)

Mika Tajima

b. 1975, Los Angeles

The woven paintings that comprise Mika Tajima’s Negative Entropy series translate recorded sounds into meticulously handwoven optical patterns, transcending the auditory and rendering this sensation into a visual and tactile work. The phrase “negative entropy” was introduced by Austrian physicist

Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 popular-science book What is Life?. To have negative entropy means that a system has become less disordered; Tajima’s Negative Entropy woven paintings utilize this biological and mathematic concept to examine human relationships to technology, exploring paradoxes in automation, the tech industry, and in capitalist spirituality. Early Negative Entropy paintings used recordings of antiquated technologies; Tajima’s early research brought her to a Toyota car production facility in Japan, where she uncovered contradictions in the ethos of production on an automated assembly line: “The workers were conditioned to aid the robot instead of robots helping people. This goes against the utopian idea that automation will free us to pursue meaningful life activities.” Tajima has evolved the focus of her Negative Entropy works from industrial manufacturing to production related to the body, energy, and spirituality. Negative Entropy (TAE, Test Shot, Inner Divertor Operation, Norman, Cream, Double) (2022) is derived from recordings the artist made at TriAlpha Energy, a California-based fusion energy company that develops technologies for producing clean power. The present work contains Tajima’s woven realization of her recording of a nanosecond fusion explosion test. Woven using an industrial Jacquard loom, a labor-intensive precursor to modern weaving technology, Tajima’s Negative Entropy works interrogate historical and contemporary modes of production alongside philosophical questions about the demand for human production under capitalism.