Frieze Seoul

Past
Sep 2 – Sep 5, 2022
Seoul

Art Fair Details:

Frieze Seoul
COEX
Booth A15
Sep 2 – 5, 2022

Online Presentation:

Agnes Martin
Beneath Thought and Idea Aug 18 – Sep 6, 2022

Press:

Press Release

Connect:

Frieze Seoul
@friezeofficial
@pacegallery

Above: Huong Dodinh, J 6, 1996, canvas mounted on wood panel © Huong Dodinh

Pace is pleased to detail its presentation for the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul.

The gallery’s booth will feature a focused selection of works, grounded in abstraction, by a group of artists within and beyond Pace’s roster. Spotlighting Pace’s strong contemporary program, the gallery’s Frieze Seoul booth traces exchanges among intergenerational abstractionists. Pace will also unveil a new expansion of its arts complex in Seoul during the fair.

Pace’s Frieze Seoul presentation will feature works by Huong Dodinh, Virginia Jaramillo, and Maysha Mohamedi, all of whom joined Pace’s program in 2022. Frieze Seoul marks Jaramillo’s debut showing with Pace, and the artist will have her first solo exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles in 2023. Booth highlights also include new paintings by Torkwase Dyson and Adam Pendleton; a new sculpture by Lynda Benglis; two recent sculptures by Kiki Smith; and works by Louise Nevelson, Gerhard Richter, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Marina Perez Simão, Mika Tajima, and others. Concurrent with Frieze Seoul, Benglis is presenting a major exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas; Pendleton’s largest museum show in Europe to date is on view at Mumok in Vienna; and Tajima’s solo exhibition at the Dazaifu Tenmangu Museum and Shrine Grounds in Japan continues through October 10.

A six-by-six-foot painting by Agnes Martin, a key figure in the gallery’s history and legacy, will be the cornerstone of the presentation. Reflecting Pace’s roots in Minimalism, this striking late-career work, Untitled #2 (1992), can be understood as part of Martin’s pursuit to deepen her understanding of painting’s essence by way of radiant, meditative abstraction—Martin’s works of this caliber and type are rarely made available. With multicolor stripes that appear to float on its canvas, the painting reflects the artist’s interest in unearthing new possibilities of perception and experience, toward a purity of expression, through her medium. Martin’s creation of Untitled #2 was followed by a return to exuberant color that would mark her work from 1994 until her death in 2004.

On the occasion of the fair, Pace will open an outdoor sculpture courtyard and Osulloc Tea House—where a rotating display of prints, editions, and titles from Pace Publishing, the gallery’s imprint, will be on view and available for purchase—at its gallery complex in Seoul. This latest expansion of Pace’s Seoul gallery, where a new ground floor exhibition space specially equipped for immersive, experiential artworks opened in March 2022, builds on its strong presence in the Korean capital since 2017, when it became one of the first international galleries to establish a permanent space in the city. Solo exhibitions by Adrian Ghenie and the collective teamLab will be presented at Pace’s Seoul gallery during the run of Frieze Seoul. NFT projects from Pace Verso, the gallery’s web3 arm, will also be on view at the gallery.

Agnes Martin

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

Agnes Martin, one of the most influential painters of her generation, left an indelible mark on the history of modern and contemporary art. Growing up in western Canada, she moved between New Mexico and New York throughout her early career. For a pivotal decade starting in 1957, Martin lived and worked in Coenties Slip, a neighborhood in lower Manhattan she shared with emerging artists including Ellsworth Kelly, before returning to New Mexico in 1968. Inspired by the transcendent qualities of paintings by Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, Martin considered herself to be an Abstract Expressionist. Nonetheless, her oeuvre played a critical role in heralding the advent of Minimalism, influencing, among others, Eva Hesse’s sculptural practice and Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. Characterized by austere lines and grids superimposed upon muted grounds of color, Martin’s paintings elegantly negotiate the confines of structure and space, draftsmanship, and the metaphysical.

Learn more about this pivotal work in the online exhibition Agnes Martin: Beneath Thought and Idea.

Featured Works

Huong Dodinh

b. 1945, Soc Trang, Vietnam

Huong Dodinh was born in 1945 in Soc Trang, in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Dodinh and her family were forced to flee their war torn home in 1953 and sought refuge in Paris, where the artist continues to live and work today. At a boarding school in Rambouillet, Dodinh witnessed snow for the first time, marveling at the blending of land and sky. She calls this luminescent scene her artistic “epiphany” and it continues to inspire her painting. Dodinh studied at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1965 to 1969, completing courses in a wide array of disciplines including engraving, lithography, frescoes, painting, and architecture. During this time, Dodinh was deeply affected by the violence of the Vietnam War and the uprisings of May 1968. After a three-year break, Dodinh was able to return to her artistic practice with a newfound sense of freedom. In the decades that followed, Dodinh dedicated herself to painting, occasionally exhibiting in Paris and often encountering fellow artists based in France such as Peter Matisse, Joan Mitchell, and Lisa de Kooning.

Dodinh is the recipient of several important awards and distinctions including, 1st Prize at the International Grand Prize for Painting in Cannes (1981), the Silver Cross of Merit and French Dedication (1996), and the Vice President Maison de la Culture d'Asie Orientale (1997). She presented a solo exhibition in 2021 at the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, and has participated in group presentations at FRAC de Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, as well as the major contemporary art exhibition Triptyque in Angers.

Matthew Day Jackson

b. 1974, Panorama City, California

Matthew Day Jackson is a painter, sculptor, draftsperson, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Through his multifarious practice, which includes collage, drawing, video, performance, and installation, Jackson engages with a wide range of subjects, from the historical and scientific to the futuristic and fantastical.

Utilizing notably American images and iconography associated with LIFE magazine, the Apollo 11 Moon landing, the West, the atomic bomb, and more, he examines how an inexorable pursuit of a false utopia throughout American history has shaped notions of national identity. Jackson brings his own experience and embodiment of the past and present to the fore of his practice. At the core of his work is a deep interest in finding similarities within binaries and dichotomies, particularly the simultaneity of beauty and horror.

Virginia Jaramillo

b. 1939, El Paso, Texas

Born in southwestern Texas, Jaramillo’s family relocated to Los Angeles, California, when she was two years old, a move that would shape her artistic career. From a young age, her parents encouraged her to explore the arts, enrolling her at Manual Arts High School, which counts Jaramillo among their distinguished alumnae along with Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, and Daniel LaRue Johnson. Over the weekends, Jaramillo’s art teacher would take a small group of students to Charles and Ray Eames’ studio for lectures and films. The Eames’ sleek, minimal, industrial style influenced Jaramillo, whose lifelong practice has been marked by a commitment to complementary tenets of minimalism and modernity.

Maysha Mohamedi

b. 1980, Los Angeles

Maysha Mohamedi received a BS in 2002 from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied cognitive science, specializing in neuroscience. After graduating, she went on to earn an MFA in painting from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2011. In her abstract paintings, the artist meditates on selfhood and consciousness through a singular lexicon of color, composition, and mark-making. Vibrant and playful, Mohamedi’s innovative practice points toward a new mode of atmospheric abstraction that registers certain conditions specific to Los Angeles—and American life as a whole—in the early 21st century. Reflecting her personal history, everyday experiences, and key constellations in her own cultural matrix as a woman of Iranian descent, her palette is both purely abstract and directly connected to the patchwork of landscapes, objects, and environments that comprise her life. These range from an Ojai, California playground the artist visited with her children, clippings from cookbooks and magazines, to sea glass found on the shore. Mohamedi’s works are reflections of her own thinking, crystallized as moments of haptic communion. The artist’s academic background in neuroscience is found in the liveliness and expansiveness of her paintings. Liberated from the constraints and dictates of the three-dimensional world, her immersive works exude a sense of freedom and illimitability. For Mohamedi, the viewer is an equal creator in this shared universe of boundless possibilities. Mohamedi’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions with Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles (2011); The Lodge, Los Angeles (2018); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton (2020); and Massimo De Carlo, Paris (2022). Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at Artual Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2019); Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon (2019); and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2021), among others.

Adam Pendleton

b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia

Adam Pendleton is recognized for his conceptual practice, which engages with language, abstraction, and identity through a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, writing, film, and performance. His works are centered around linguistic and visual communication with varying degrees of legibility that create thought-provoking presentations. Often referencing artistic and political movements, he appropriates and reconfigures images and texts to critically examine the resonance of ideas from varied cultural perspectives. Pendleton explores the construction and negation of meaning through Black Dada, which he proposes as a conceptual framework that he introduces into broader conversations about representation.

Lynda Benglis

b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Since the 1960s, Lynda Benglis has been celebrated for the free, ecstatic forms she has made that are simultaneously playful and visceral, organic and abstract. Benglis began her career in the midst of Postminimal art and has pushed the traditions of painting and sculpture into new territories throughout her career. Comprised of a variety of materials—from beeswax, latex, and polyurethane foam to later innovations with plaster, gold, vaporized metals, glass, ceramics, and paper—her works demonstrate an enduring fascination with process. The embrace of flowing forms, color, and sensual surfaces attests to her inventive and radical spirit. Benglis’s experimental videos expand her interest of process to new media, featuring performative actions and using technological mediation to explore themes of physical presence, narcissism, sexuality, and gendered identity. Through her multifarious practice, Benglis continues a long-running investigation of the proprioceptive, sensory experiences of making and viewing her works.

Torkwase Dyson

b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois

Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining environmental racism as well as the history and future of black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with the ways in which space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by black and brown bodies. In 2019, Dyson’s solo exhibition I Can Drink the Distance was on view at The Cooper Union, New York, and her work was also presented at the Sharjah Biennial.

In addition to participating in group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and California African American Museum, Los Angeles, Dyson has had solo exhibitions and installations at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia; and Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont.