Frieze New York

Robert Mangold and Arlene Shechet

Past
May 1 – May 5, 2024
New York

Art Fair Details

Frieze New York
The Shed
Booth B11
May 1 – 5, 2024

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Above: Robert Mangold, Double Pentagon Oxide 4, 2024 © Robert Mangold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Arlene Shechet, Better Half, 2024 © Arlene Shechet

Pace is pleased to announce details of its presentation for the 2024 edition of Frieze New York, which runs from May 1 to 5 at The Shed.

The gallery’s booth (#B11) will showcase the unexpected affinities between two contemporary abstractionists: Robert Mangold and Arlene Shechet. Exhibited together at the fair, Mangold’s paintings and Shechet’s sculptures speak to the expressive power of geometry, line, color, and space in both two- and three-dimensional mediums.

This presentation at Frieze New York will coincide with the opening of Arlene Shechet: Girl Group—in which the artist is debuting six new large-scale commissions—at Storm King Art Center in New York on May 4.

The gallery’s booth will bring together new paintings by Mangold and new sculptures by Shechet. Combining, dividing, layering, and twinning are present in the works of both artists, who explore questions of symmetry and asymmetry, interiority and exteriority, wholeness and fragmentation, and opening up and collapsing inward on their own aesthetic and material terms. Mangold’s and Shechet’s varied experiments in abstraction will be on view in this special presentation.

The shaped canvases by Mangold on view at the fair reflect his deep and enduring interest in the fundamental elements of composition which have guided his practice for more than 60 years. In these recent works, shape has become the most salient element of the artist’s composition. The integral relationship of shape and drawing, once essential to Mangold’s practice, has been foregone, with the drawing no longer helping to determine the shape. The shapes of the canvases, all variations on a five-sided polygon, reinforce the objecthood of the paintings, while vertical hand-drawn lines that appear in several works emphasize the painting’s surface. In contrast to the drawing, the push and pull of the canvas shapes themselves seem to extend Mangold’s paintings into illusory dimensional planes.

Shechet’s six new sculptures at Frieze New York, including five small-scale works and one freestanding composition, combine painted and dyed hardwood, steel, glazed ceramic, and gold leaf elements. In these geometric constructions, as with her other bodies of work, the artist investigates the visual paradoxes and contradictions that arise during her improvisational, intuitive—yet highly technical—process. Uniting seemingly disparate forms and materials, Shechet is guided by a general impulse, engaging in a spirited exchange with her works as she wills them to life. The colors, steel linear forms, and vocabulary of geometry in the sculptures she will show on Pace’s booth at the fair are in dialogue with Mangold’s paintings, and vice versa. Evoking different interpersonal and familial relationships in their titles—which include Live In Lover, Brother, Better Half, and Seventh Son—Shechet’s new works encourage open ended interpretations by viewers, who bring their own associations and experiences to their readings of each sculpture.

Exhibitions by Adam Pendleton, Tara Donovan, and Huong Dodinh will open at Pace’s 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York on May 3, coinciding with Frieze New York. On May 10, an exhibition of a large-scale digital artwork by teamLab will open at Pace’s 510 West 25th Street space, marking the collective’s first solo show in New York in ten years.

Featured Works

Double Pentagon Oxide 1 by Robert Mangold — Robert Mangold, *Double Pentagon Oxide 1*, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 40" × 56-1/2" × 1-9/16" (101.6 cm × 143.5 cm × 4 cm)

Live-In Lover by Arlene Shechet — Arlene Shechet, *Live-In Lover*, 2024, painted and dyed hardwood, steel, glazed ceramic, and gold leaf, 41" × 24" × 23" (104.1 cm × 61 cm × 58.4 cm)

Brother by Arlene Shechet — Arlene Shechet, *Brother*, 2024, painted and dyed hardwood, steel, and glazed ceramic, 26" × 21" × 19" (66 cm × 53.3 cm × 48.3 cm)

Yellow Oxide Structure with Line by Robert Mangold — Robert Mangold, *Yellow Oxide Structure with Line*, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 38-1/2" × 43" × 1-5/8" (97.8 cm × 109.2 cm × 4.1 cm)

Double Pentagon Oxide 2 by Robert Mangold — Robert Mangold, *Double Pentagon Oxide 2*, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 36-1/4" × 57-1/2" × 1-9/16" (92.1 cm × 146.1 cm × 4 cm)

Better Half by Arlene Shechet — Arlene Shechet, *Better Half*, 2024, painted and dyed hardwood, steel, glazed ceramic, and gold leaf, 21-1/2" × 19" × 17" (54.6 cm × 48.3 cm × 43.2 cm)

Double Pentagon Oxide 4 by Robert Mangold — Robert Mangold, *Double Pentagon Oxide 4*, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 40" × 56" × 1-9/16" (101.6 cm × 142.2 cm × 4 cm)

Seventh Son by Arlene Shechet — Arlene Shechet, *Seventh Son*, 2024, painted and dyed hardwood, steel, and glazed ceramic, 26" × 19" × 15" (66 cm × 48.3 cm × 38.1 cm)

Sweetheart by Arlene Shechet — Arlene Shechet, *Sweetheart*, 2024, painted and dyed hardwood, steel, and glazed ceramic, 24-1/2" × 13" × 13" (62.2 cm × 33 cm × 33 cm)

Pentagon with Line by Robert Mangold — Robert Mangold, *Pentagon with Line*, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 64" × 76" × 1-9/16" (162.6 cm × 193 cm × 4 cm)

Double Pentagon Oxide 3 by Robert Mangold — Robert Mangold, *Double Pentagon Oxide 3*, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 40" × 56-1/4" × 1-9/16" (101.6 cm × 142.9 cm × 4 cm)

Niece by Arlene Shechet — Arlene Shechet, *Niece*, 2024, painted and dyed hardwood, powder-coated steel, and glazed ceramic, 32" × 18" × 15-1/2" (81.3 cm × 45.7 cm × 39.4 cm)

About the Artists

Robert Mangold

Robert Mangold has, since the 1950s, explored line and color on supports ranging in shape, size, and dimension. Committed to abstraction as a means of communication, he has worked within a consistent geometric vocabulary to produce a varied body of paintings and works on paper. His career has developed through an evolution of techniques for the application of paint onto his chosen surface—first plywood and masonite, and later, beginning in 1968, stretched canvas. Moving away from the conventions of paintings, he introduced shaped canvases, working with symmetrical and asymmetrical forms as well as curvilinear edges. For his early shaped and multi-panel constructions, Mangold airbrushed oil-based pigments in gradations of color, and later used a roller before ultimately adopting a brush to apply acrylic in subtle hues that near transparency. He remained intrigued by color as much as structure, and his relationship with it shifted throughout the decades. His initial palette, inspired by industrial objects—file cabinets, brick walls, and trucks— transitioned toward colors that evoke mood: warm ochres, light blues, deep oranges, olive greens, and other hues. Mangold’s mostly monochromatic compositions show an attention to gesture with the addition of hand-drawn pencil lines that curve across the planes of color.

Arlene Shechet

Arlene Shechet is a sculptor known for her effortless combination of disparate elements, precarious and provisional arrangements, and boundary collapsing visual paradoxes.

With gravity-defying work that seems to tilt, contort, bend, and melt, Shechet’s sculptures appear to be set in motion while unearthing the expressive potential of material and forms and forcing us to sit with—and move around—its contradictions. Highly technical yet entirely intuitive, her work embraces improvisation and seeks to examine the humor and pathos of the lived human experience. Recognized by the CAA with the Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work (2016), Shechet has changed the landscape of ceramics since she began working with clay in 2007. Embracing the inherent duality of clay— its malleability and durability, its fragility and hardened strength—Shechet has led a resurgence of ceramic work in contemporary art through her experiments with glazes, hybrid forms, and pedestals by embracing risk, rejecting binaries, and leaning into—and driving dialogue between—the underlying tensions of not only form and material, but life itself.

To inquire about works by Arlene Shechet and Robert Mangold, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

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