Paris+ par Art Basel

Past
Oct 19 – Oct 23, 2022
Paris

Art Fair Details:

Paris+ par Art Basel
Grand Palais Éphémère
Booth D16
Oct 19 – 23, 2022

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Above: Antoni Tàpies, Avís , 2001, mixed media on canvas 114 cm × 146 cm (44-7/8" × 57-1/2") © Fundació Antoni Tàpies / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid

Pace’s booth at the inaugural edition of Paris+ par Art Basel will bring together major contemporary works and historically significant pieces by key 20th century figures.

Highlights include new paintings by Maysha Mohamedi and Matthew Day Jackson, both of whom joined Pace’s program this year. Mohamedi’s Grow Me Up in the Fire of Affliction (2022) is an evocative and enveloping large-scale painting featuring an earthy palette of terracotta, pinks, and sky-blue hues inspired by a vintage magazine ad for Air France. Paintings by Lee Ufan will also be presented on the booth, including a large-scale work from the artist’s Response series, which explores the dynamics among temporality, gesture, and space. In January 2022, Ufan’s work was the subject of a major exhibition titled Requiem at the Hôtel Vernon in the heart of Arles, France, where the artist opened a new museum dedicated to his work in April. Further contemporary offerings include recent work by Adam Pendleton, Robert Longo, and Paulina Olowska.

Matter is Void, the first-ever NFT project by the interdisciplinary art collective teamLab, will also be on view in Pace’s booth at Paris+ par Art Basel. The unique NFTs in this series bear the words “Matter is Void,” a reference to the Japanese-Buddhist expression Shikisoku Zekuu, which meditates on the meanings of emptiness. To explore ideas of authorship and ownership, teamLab has adopted a radical format for Matter is Void that enables the NFT purchasers to change the words displayed in the work. In parallel to its debut in Paris, one of the NFTs will have its initial “Matter is Void” text modified into a new phrase as part of a major activation across large-scale screens in New York.

Alongside these contemporary and technologically engaged artworks, Pace’s presentation will also feature works by 20th century masters, including a significant work by Antoni Tàpies, a 1980 painting by Jean Dubuffet, and large-scale collages by Louise Nevelson, whose critically acclaimed exhibition Persistence recently closed at the Procuratie Vecchie in Venice, an Official Collateral Event of the 59th Venice Biennale. An exemplary 1959 painting by Lucio Fontana, who founded the Spatialism movement, embodies the artist’s radical reimagining of two- and three- dimensional space within the parameters of a canvas. Sculptures and paintings created by Kiki Kogelnik in the 1960s and early 1970s will be important components of Pace’s presentation. Artworks from this period of Kogelnik’s career speak to her shift towards direct engagement with representations of women. Major paintings by Richard Pousette-Dart, Antoni Tàpies, and Robert Ryman will also be shown on the booth.

teamLab

Matter is Void

teamLab is an interdisciplinary group comprised of artists, programmers, engineers, mathematicians, architects, designers, and computer graphics animators. Their collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, technology, design, and the natural world. Rooted in the traditions of historical Japanese art, teamLab operates from a distinct sense of spatial recognition that they call Ultrasubjective Space.

By exploring traditional aesthetics and contemporary technology, they generate new viewing experiences that raise questions about how people understand and interact with their surrounding world, encouraging new ways of perceiving and conceptualizing time and space.

Matter is Void (2022) is the first NFT by teamLab and is one of seven works in the series. The title is a reference to the Japanese-Buddhist expression Shikisoku Zekuu, which meditates on the meanings of emptiness. The project reflects teamLab’s long-standing investigations of Spatial Calligraphy—or calligraphy drawn in space. With many of its digital works, teamLab has explored the ways that calligraphic forms might shapeshift across two- and three-dimensional spaces. In Matter is Void, brushstrokes appear on the screen, continuously floating and rotating in space. These brushstrokes periodically coalesce to form the phrase “Matter is Void,” or a different phrase selected by the NFT purchaser. These fleeting moments of legibility are interrupted when the brushstrokes take on abstract choreographies once more. Each Matter is Void artwork has a different color variation: black in black, white in white, gold light, fire, water, fog, and black in white—the color of the present work. This new NFT project reflects the collective’s explorations of the relationships between individuals and the external world. As such, these artworks bring questions of being and ephemerality to the fore.

New Artists

Matthew Day Jackson

b. 1974, Panorama City, California

Jackson is a painter, sculptor, draftsperson, and photographer based in Brooklyn. 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. Jackson has maintained a decades-long exploration of varied histories, technological phenomena, and modes of mythmaking. Jackson explores a wide range of subjects—historical, futuristic, scientific, spiritual, and fantastical. He uses recognizable American images and iconography associated with LIFE Magazine, the Apollo 11 moon landing, the American West, the atomic bomb, and more to examine the ways that an inexorable pursuit of a false utopia throughout American history has shaped notions of national identity in the United States.

Reichenbach Falls (after Turner) by Matthew Day Jackson — Matthew Day Jackson, *Reichenbach Falls (after Turner)*, 2022, Wood, oil paint, epoxy, acrylic paint, urethane plastic, lead, paper, stainless steel frame, 85-1/4" × 57-1/2" × 2" (216.5 cm × 146.1 cm × 5.1 cm)

Jackson’s most recent series of landscape paintings echoes the works of Caspar David Friedrich, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and other 19th century figures. Utilizing a semi-autonomous laser process that imbues colors and forms with an otherworldly feel, the artist mines
the history of landscape painting, debunking mythologies of artistic genius and the very concept of a “masterpiece.” Reflecting Jackson’s long-standing interest in art historical allusions and intersections between physical and digital modes of art making, these works also investigate the complexities and ambiguities of authorship. Drawing through lines between the political and social issues of the 19th century and those of the present day, Jackson brings memory to the fore of these paintings.

Reichenbach Falls (after Turner) (2022) exemplifies the artist’s research- based, experimental process, which he tailors for each of his works. The varied materials he uses are equally as significant as the conceptual underpinnings of his artworks, and Jackson often aims to upend viewers’ expectations and initial impressions or interpretations. His layered, complex works invite questions of medium, materiality, and meaning, which are answered only through sustained consideration, analysis, and interrogation.

Maysha Mohamedi

b. 1980, Los Angeles, California

Mohamedi received a BS in 2002 from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied cognitive science, specializing in neuroscience, and went on to earn an MFA in painting from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2011. The artist meditates on selfhood and consciousness in her abstract paintings through a singular lexicon of color, composition, and mark-making. Vibrant and playful, her 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, her palette is purely abstract. The artist often applies paint directly to her canvases using her hands, and these liberated gestures continue to engage the viewer as an equal creator in a shared universe of boundless possibilities. Mohamedi has said of her work: “The link between my brain, my hand, and the surface has to be as direct as possible...There are so many touches I make on the surface that are not visible, but I believe and hope they are observable.”

Grow Me Up in the Fire of Affliction by Maysha Mohamedi — Maysha Mohamedi, *Grow Me Up in the Fire of Affliction*, 2022, oil on canvas, 99" × 88" (251.5 cm × 223.5 cm)

Grow Me Up in the Fire of Affliction (2022) is a stunning example of Mohamedi’s deft use of color, composition, and balance. In this recent large-scale work, a forceful and delicate syncopation of form presides, from the meandering thin black lines carving out the background to fragmented traces of unknown outlined objects. Composed of pale warm tones culled from the palette of a vintage Air France magazine spread, these forms at once act and react with each other. Creating a neural network-like composition, the convolutional shapes in the present work fall apart and together, repeat and overlap. The title of the present work quotes a Christian sermon, which among other things, Mohamedi listens to in order to help cope in moments of stress, the preacher’s words becoming a secular form of guided and moving meditation. She describes this profoundly personal and therapeutic practice: “Sometimes I even shout out the preacher’s words, call-and-response style, to solidify my healing in this three-dimensional world. The painting ends up being a psychological landscape.”

Mika Tajima

b. 1975, Los Angeles, California

At the heart of Mika Tajima’s multidisciplinary practice is a profound inquiry into the conditions of human agency and self-determinacy in built and virtual spaces. Tajima invited Pace to her Brooklyn studio, where she discusses how her work approaches concepts of performance, control, and freedom.

Art d'Ameublement (Station Météo) by Mika Tajima — Mika Tajima, *Art d'Ameublement (Station Météo)*, 2022, Spray acrylic, thermoformed PETG, 72" × 54" (182.9 cm × 137.2 cm)

Tajima’s expansive practice is a rigorous interrogation of the deeply-sensed, invisible forces of the physical and technological world. Through her work, the artist creates heightened encounters that target the senses and emotions of the viewer, underscoring the three central tenets of her practice: performance, control, and freedom. Encompassing sculpture, painting, textile, performance, and installation, Tajima’s work seeks to materialize the ungraspable, bringing awareness to the energies and frequencies that exist within and between humans. A driving force in Tajima’s practice is an inquiry into the relationship between nature and technology, mapping and exploring the relational structures of human bodies in built environments.

Borrowing their title from French composer Erik Satie’s Musique d’ameublement (Furniture Music)— a series of background musical compositions with no discernible beginning or end—Tajima’s Art d’Ameublement paintings translate the feeling of a place into an abstract visual landscape. Tajima expertly creates soft, otherworldly color gradients by spraying paint onto an acrylic surface. Recalling the visual language of 20th century abstraction while maintaining a contemporary aesthetic is a singular talent of Tajima’s practice and speaks to her broad understanding of the history of art. Each piece in this ambient painting series is subtitled by a geographic location, drawing on psycho-geographic associations of the designated place. In this work, Tajima nods to a weather station and in so doing, recalls natural imagery such as the sun rising over a misty lake or cool morning fog dissipating over the ocean.

Featured Works

Avís by Antoni Tàpies — Antoni Tàpies, *Avís*, 2001, mixed media on canvas, 114 cm × 146 cm (44-7/8" × 57-1/2")

Antoni Tàpies

b. 1923, Barcelona, Spain
d. 2012, Barcelona, Spain

Lucio Fontana

b. 1899, Rosario, Argentina

Pablo Picasso

b. 1881, Malaga, Spain

Yoshitomo Nara

b. 1959, Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan

Lee Ufan

b. 1936, Kyongsang-namdo, South Korea

Adam Pendleton

b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia

Torkwase Dyson

b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois

Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois) 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 investigate and explore the ways in which space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by black and brown bodies. The artist’s radical approach to artmaking interrogates historical and existing infrastructure and architecture to engage with form as power. Working in a space between abstraction and representation, her multidisciplinary practice includes drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, performance, and writing— with painting as the key element informing all other media. In Dyson’s work, the body acts as a conceptual nexus, encompassing subjects ranging from bridges, levees, and rivers, to global industry and the Anthropocene. She explores this through what she calls “Black Compositional Thought,” a mode of awareness that contends with formal applications of mark-making and constructions of space as they manifest in both mind and material. The legacy of environmental racism and the ongoing traumas of climate change have driven the artist’s conceptual and material approach to black spatial liberation.

In her new work, Symbolic Geography #1 (Hypershape) (2022), Dyson utilizes shapes, lines, and planes to create a composition grounded in geometric abstraction that is intimately connected to the Black experience of resilience and liberation. Bringing the artist’s distinctive visual lexicon into three dimensions, the present sculpture emphasizes the tension between scale and weight and belongs to her Hypershape series. Using wood, graphite, acrylic, and glass, the present work is composed of multiple geometric variables over which white lines, dots, and shapes appear, carving out the space into sections and drawing the viewer’s eye to specific areas. The artist describes the Hypershape series: “It’s a living algorithm. I see them as discontinuous drawings that are indeterminable, interconnected, and precarious. This methodology has produced sensoria from which painting and sculpture get imagined.”

Robert Ryman

b. 1930, Nashville, Tennessee

Hermann Nitsch

b. 1938, Vienna, Austria
d. 2022

Hermann Nitsch, a founding member of the Viennese Actionists following his training at Vienna’s Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in the 1950s, was infamous for his performative and macabre oeuvre involving self-mutilation, crucifixion, and buckets of animal blood. Nitsch’s elaborately choreographed actions comprised the Das Orgian Mysterien Theater (The Orgies Mysteries Theater)—more than 100 actions that involved components ranging from macabre to sexual to hysterical. The Orgies Mysteries Theater’s Gesamtkunstwerk (a “total artwork,” a term canonized by composer Richard Wagner, a noted influence on Nitsch) the 6-DAY-PLAY (1998), took place in August 1998 and involved hundreds of performers—musicians and actors— and thousands of audience members at Nitsch’s Prinzendorf castle, in his native Austria. The artist described the event, which involved blood, meat, intestines, carcasses of slaughtered animals, and naked human performers, as “an aesthetic ritual glorifying existence.” Alongside and within this bacchanalian revelry, 10,000 meters of canvas were used for action painting as the events of the performance unfolded. The 6-DAY-PLAY was restaged at Prinzendorf Castle in July 2022 for the second time ever, 24 years after its first iteration, speaking to Nitsch’s remarkable following and profound legacy.

Schüttbild (2009) takes its name from the German schütteln (verb: to shake, vibrate, agitate; to jolt or toss), and in its similarity to the paintings resulting from the event calls to mind the fixation on slaughter and violence as well as the saturnalia surrounding the 6-DAY-PLAY. Lively and nearly celebratory, the shades of red, green, and blue evoke the contemporary trimmings for Christmas, recalling Nitsch’s ritualistic performances that often borrow elements from Catholic mass (Nitsch was Catholic). He cites German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald’s painting for the 16th century Isenheim Altarpiece as a foundational source of inspiration for his practice and references Greek tragedies and the Passion of the Christ as sources that galvanized his interest in the intersection of art and pain. Nitsch, while an undoubtedly controversial figure— the artist served three short prison terms during his life—is survived by a striking oeuvre housed in two monographic museums, in Mistelbach, Austria and Naples, as well as in prominent worldwide museums and collections.

Kiki Kogelnik

b. 1935, Graz, Austria
d. 1997, Vienna, Austria,

Potential for Hypersonic Flight by Kiki Kogelnik — Kiki Kogelnik, *Potential for Hypersonic Flight*, 1965, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72" × 47-3/4" (182.9 cm × 121.3 cm) 73-1/2" × 49-1/4" × 3" (186.7 cm × 125.1 cm × 7.6 cm), frame

Kiki Kogelnik studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna before turning away from European Abstraction, eventually relocating to New York in the early 1960s. In an era shaped by the Space Race and Cold War, Kogelnik became fascinated with the uncertainties and possibilities of a new, technology-driven future and the evolving representations of women’s bodies. Kogelnik’s paintings and drawings depict a world of dismembered techno-bodies and mechanically enhanced avatars floating aimlessly in vibrant, pop-like compositions reminiscent of the bold shapes and color planes associated with modern advertising at the time.

In conversation with the punk and new wave culture that sprung up around her SoHo studio in New York Kogelnik’s work occupied its own cultural space, intersecting with various movements but always defying categorization on a larger scale. Potential for Hypersonic Flight (1965) is a foremost example of Kogelnik’s early experimentation in representing the human form. She began making full-body traces in the early 60s, her outlined subjects ranging from her own body to fellow artists including Sam Francis and Claes Oldenburg. The artist referred to these human form outlines as her “cutouts,” and explained that she has “taken” a depiction of their subject—as one would describe a photograph—and “kept a running list of ‘People I have taken’ and ‘People I want to take.’”1 One known subject “taken” for Potential for Hypersonic Flight—from their distinctive pose with hands folded behind their head—was Peruvian businessman Manuel Ulloa Elías, whom she began a short-lived affair with towards the end of 1963. On the present work, the Director of the Kiki Kogelnik foundation, Stephen Hepworth, notes:

The more vertical figure is an adaptation of Manuel’s traced silhouette, the hands no longer fully tucked behind his head. The female figure, which bares the letter “K” (Kiki) below, appears to be fixed to his groin by a mechanical clockface each of the hours marked by a peach dot, its design strikingly similar to contraceptive pill packaging of the time, which while being an early user of, Kogelnik felt was altering her body. His figure in turn appears to be tethered preventing his upward drift to the two openings above, his brain dominated by a similar device to the one that joins the two bodies at his groin. The painting can be seen as a graphic rendering of the dynamic of their relationship at the time.

Richard Pousette-Dart

b. 1916, Saint Paul, Minnesota
d. 1992, New York, New York

Richard Pousette-Dart, a leading voice in the New York School, achieved a cohesive body of work, expressing his spiritual beliefs through form, color, and gesture. Although Pousette-Dart emerged and is historically grouped with the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, he refused to concede to any common aesthetic tendencies, never embracing action painting. He developed a symbolic lexicon and, in the 1960s, a pointillist style exemplified in the imploding light paintings that would characterize his work for the rest of his life. Having worked in a photo retouching studio and as a photographer himself, these paintings were inspired by the granular structure of film. Pousette-Dart observed that photographs seemed to dissolve into focus out of nothingness, much like his dots of paint congealed into forms on the field of the canvas. “Even as they seem still to be in the act of forming, the shapes appear to be disintegrating, luminous and radiant, the shapes and the fields surrounding them conspiring to appear interactive, harmonious and eternal,” wrote art historian Sam Hunter.

Space Continuum, Part II (1989) is a singular example of Pousette-Dart’s late body of work, which features the artist’s matured use of color and form: layered, painterly strokes create meditative, yet assertive compositions focused on color and light. Characterized by fields of individual marks that coalesce into balanced arrangements, this energetic cycle of paintings expands upon the style Pousette-Dart began cultivating in the 60s. Curator and art historian Lowery Stokes Sims, who organized the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s 1997 Pousette-Dart exhibition, wrote of the artist’s mid and late career works, “...the linear quality of the earlier work gave way to vibrating optical effects achieved by the juxtaposition of individual daubs of color. Rather than a line delineating contours, it is the visual mediation of individual chromatic incidents congealing in our vision that is described by what the artist called edges ‘of feeling/the living edge of form/created living form.’”2

Joel Shapiro

b. 1941, New York, New York

Jean Dubuffet

b. 1901, Le Havre, France
d. 1985, Paris, France

Louise Nevelson

b. 1899, Kiev
d. 1988, New York

Lynda Benglis

b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Huong Dodinh

b. 1945, Soc Trang, Vietnam

For nearly six decades Huong Dodinh has devoted her painting practice to three central tenets: clarity, density, and transparency. Based in Paris, the artist draws significantly on her Southeast Asian identity. Her artistic spark was ignited when she saw snowfall for the first time while at school in the outskirts of Paris after her family fled the First Indochina War in Vietnam, which lasted from 1946–54. This scene inspired close attention to the intimate relationship between color and light. She likens her method of working to the act of meditation, approaching each painting with resolute discipline and working in silence as she clears her mind in order to translate her inner sense of self onto the canvas.

K.A. 35 (2000) is exemplary of Dodinh’s elegant minimalist compositions as well as her exploration of the fluidity of line and form. Inspired by classical dance, she places great importance on the rhythm and grace of her gestures, allowing her forms to be an extension of her body in motion. Careful attention is placed on the materials used; she selects very fine-grained canvas to achieve a flexible and smooth finish. Over this, Dodinh layers numerous thin coats of her handmade paint, composed of mineral pigments she mixes herself. For the present work, the artist used organic binders and natural pigments on canvas mounted on wood. Dodinh creates subtle geometric forms using cool and warm hues. K.A. 35 is composed of misty bands of color divided by streams of green, blue, red, and black lines that converge above the center of the composition. The artist’s intricate and delicate paintings radiate light and depth while remaining entirely abstract.

Yto Barrada

b. 1971, Paris, France

Prabhavathi Meppayil

b. 1965, Bangalore, India

Richard Misrach

b. 1949, Los Angeles, California

Richard Misrach, Untitled (Blackwater 1), 2012, pigment print mounted to Dibond, image, paper and mount, 59 1/4 x 78 3/4 inches frame, 63 x 82 3/4 x 3 1/4 inches

For over 50 years, Richard Misrach has photographed the dynamic landscape of the American West through an environmentally aware and politically astute lens. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971 with a BA in Psychology. Inspired by an Eastern spiritual practice in which one does the opposite of mundane daily tasks with the view to approaching life with a more robust sense of awareness, in the early stages of his career Misrach applied this principle to photography, unlearning the rules to experiment with unexpected results. The artist’s rich exploration of the medium of photography itself is a crucial aspect of his practice. A pioneer and champion of color photography since the 70s, Misrach creates poignant, dynamic images that lean into contemporary issues and engage with the history of photography.

Untitled (Blackwater 1) (2012) is an enveloping, mysterious aerial view of the rippling surface of a body of water. The composition is purposefully ambiguous: the time of day, the scale of the scene, and the location all remain abstract. Instead, the viewer is invited into the depths of the work to discover it for themselves. Misrach explains, “By removing our everyday references that we’ve habituated to in our lives, what was revealed are extraordinary shapes, tonalities, colors – still tied to the actual landscape, but removed enough to make us pay attention.” In this way, Misrach compares the act of making a photograph to the act of painting, freeing the image from representation in order to, in the artist’s words, “discover the world anew.”