Mark Rothko and Poussette in Regina Bogat’s Studio 222 Bowery, 1960 © 2023 Regina Bogat / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Paris+ par Art Basel

Past
Oct 18 – Oct 22, 2023
Paris

Art Fair Details:

Paris+ par Art Basel
Booth D16
Grand Palais Éphémère
Oct 18 – 22, 2023

Press:

Press Release

Connect:

(opens in a new window) Paris+ par Art Basel
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Pace Gallery is pleased to announce details of its presentation for the 2023 edition of Paris+ par Art Basel, which coincides with the opening of a major Mark Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

In celebration of this landmark exhibition, Pace’s booth at the fair (#D16) will pay homage to the Abstract Expressionist painter, whose estate has been represented by the gallery since 1978.

Pace’s booth at Paris+ par Art Basel will focus on Rothko’s enduring legacy, spotlighting newly commissioned works by contemporary artists including Robert Longo, Adam Pendleton, Loie Hollowell, and Lee Ufan, who examine Rothko’s impact on their own practices. It will also feature works by Agnes Martin, Richard Pousette-Dart, Antoni Tàpies, and Adolph Gottlieb, exploring Rothko's influence on his contemporaries. Bringing together paintings, works on paper, multimedia installations, and sculptures, Pace’s booth will showcase the vast reach of Rothko’s ideas around abstraction, color, and luminosity.

Many of the contemporary works on Pace’s booth have been specifically made in homage to Rothko, including new paintings by Huong Dodinh, Torkwase Dyson, Wang Guangle, Virginia Jaramillo, Maysha Mohamedi, Marina Perez Simão, Li Songsong, and Zhang Xiaogang. A new glazed ceramic sculpture by Arlene Shechet, titled For Paris (2023), features pulsating shades of blue that can be understood in dialogue with Rothko’s experimentations with color.

The booth will also feature new textile works by Brent Wadden and Yto Barrada, who is also participating in the multidisciplinary Festival d'Automne à Paris this year. In the way of digital artworks, the gallery’s booth will include a wall-mounted sculpture created this year by Leo Villareal—who incorporates LEDs and custom software in his investigations of time, space, and perception—and two new video works by Michal Rovner.

Concurrent with their exhibitions across Pace’s global locations, Julian Schnabel, Robert Nava, Loie Hollowell, and Mary Corse will also show works on the gallery’s booth in Paris. In London, Corse’s large-scale White Inner Band paintings are brought in direct dialogue with Robert Irwin’s Unlight series in the exhibition Irwin + Corse: Parallax, on view through November 11. Hollowell’s solo show The Third Stage is on view at Pace in Geneva through October 28. Julian Schnabel: Bouquet of Mistakes, Schnabel’s twenty-second solo exhibition with Pace, continues at 540 West 25th Street in New York through October 28, and Nava’s exhibition Tornado Rose—his first solo show in Asia—is on view at Pace’s Seoul gallery through October 21.

Featured Works

Mark Rothko

b. 1903, Dvinsk, Russia
d. 1970, New York

Standing at nearly eight feet high, bathing the viewer in the incandescent wash of its nominal colors, Olive over Red (1956) is a distinguished example of Mark Rothko’s vibrant, luminescent paintings from the mid-1950s. This was a critical moment in the artist’s career at the apex of his production of radiant paintings, soon after which, in 1957, he would turn largely toward the dark paintings which dominate the final decade of his career. After departing from figuration in the mid-40s, he began to pare down his work to the elements he considered essential. Beginning in 1949, and through the mid-50s, Rothko developed and refined what would become his classical composition—stacked fields of color on vertically aligned canvases, containing two or three rectangular shapes with borders free of the canvas edges. This proved to be a versatile and enduring format that enabled him to explore subtle yet dramatic dichotomies of color, tone, contour, and application. As his son Christopher Rothko writes, “First his figure disappeared, and then his forms became fewer and simpler before receding almost entirely. Turning to color, he simplified, employing few colors, less complex colors, less stimulating colors, to make his viewer look longer and more deeply to perceive the painting. Rothko distilled and distilled until he reached the atomic level of his idea, a nearly pure expression of what he wished to say.”

Adam Pendleton

b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia

Loie Hollowell

b. 1983, Woodland, California
Lives in New York, NY

Antoni Tàpies

b. 1923, Barcelona
d. 2012, Barcelona

The title of Antoni Tàpies’s painting Porta Tancada (1994) translates from the artist’s native Catalan to “closed door.” Like many of the artist’s works from the early 90s, Porta Tancada incorporates synthetic resin and marble dust, which he marked with graffiti-like gestures of cruciform signs, demonstrating his command of unconventional materials. The titular door was a common motif in Tàpies’s oeuvre. In an interview with art historian Manuel J. Borja-Villel, Tàpies said that “[s]ome of my images want to express an approach to the mystery of existence. To do this, I used simple elements: the image of a closed door, a door torn apart, a door torn from the frame, or a lacerated door, full of scratches, as if someone had wanted to open it but couldn't.” [1] Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture, Porta Tancada uses quotidian symbols to suggest a contemplative atmosphere. The son of an Atheist father and Catholic mother, his frequent use of cross/x/Tau forms reveals a complicated relationship to Christianity; by incorporating these ambiguous shapes among other shared symbols in a graffiti-like style—in the present painting, hearts and numbers—he allows the viewer to bring their own interpretation to potentially fraught markings.

1. Manuel J. Borja-Villel, “Conversations with Antoni Tàpies, 1985-1991” in Tàpies. Communication on the Wall (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies; Valencia: IVAM Center Julio González, 1992), 23.

Adolph Gottlieb

b. 1903, New York
d. 1974, New York

Torkwase Dyson

b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois

Tony Smith

b. 1912, South Orange, New Jersey
d. 1980, New York

“[Tony Smith] would walk down the halls with a Rothko under his arms to show us what the new painting looked like,” recalled American artist George Segal, Smith’s student from the late 1940s. “He would go on and on about how beautifully Rothko was able to use color to project an inside mood.” [1] An admirer of Rothko’s deft use of color, Smith demonstrates his own dexterity with subtle color and the viscosity of paint in Untitled (1956). Comprised of oblong, biomorphic forms occupying two-dimensional space, the painting de-emphasizes depth in favor of flatness. Smith worked extensively in architecture, painting, and drawing for three decades before he began working on the large-scale modular sculptures for which he is best known; the present work is a precursor to the illusion of two dimensions that the artist experimented with in his later monumental sculptures. The diaphanous drips of paint that appear to melt from the forms in Untitled recall the famous drip paintings of Smith’s close friend and contemporary Jackson Pollock. The present work was executed after Smith and his wife, the actress and singer Jane Lawrence, moved to his childhood home in South Orange, New Jersey after living in Germany from 1953–55. Art historian Joan Pachner notes that during his time in Germany and the period following his return, his drawings and paintings bore “expressive surfaces” in the lineage of Rothko and fellow American painter Clyfford Still. Untitled is a rare example of Smith’s abstract oil paintings, bearing evidence of the artist’s hand in its gestural brushstrokes and use of rich, affecting color.

1. George Segal quoted in Joan Pachner, ed., “Writings, Interviews, and Letters” in Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor (New York: The Museum of Modern Art and H.N. Abrams, 1998), 191.

Agnes Martin

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

Agnes Martin’s late-career masterpiece Tranquility (2000) is composed of ethereal bands awash in ivory and sky-blue hues, its celestial haze characteristic of the stunning paintings the artist produced in the last years of her life. Martin’s exquisite works from the 1990s through her death in 2004 are distinguished by delicacy and lightness, as though they have been bathed in the sun. To execute these paintings, the artist first applied a layer of gesso across the canvas. She then fastidiously demarcated the borders with her signature pencil lines, which her first dealer Betty Parsons described as “heartstrings, pulled out endlessly.” [1] In Tranquility, the aquatic blue hue and careful pencil lines over gesso producing ruler-straight bands of color evoke lanes in a pool, calling to mind the artist’s years of competitive swimming in her adolescence, during which she qualified to represent her native Canada in the Olympic Games. [2] She would later explain that her mature work was also influenced by the expansive sky in Taos, New Mexico, where she lived from 1993 until her death. The present work is one of a grouping of paintings with titles corresponding to the artist’s disposition and values; other paintings produced in this period include Lovely Life (1999), I Love the Whole World (1999), Happiness (1999), Love and Goodness (2000), Gratitude (2001), Little Children Loving Love (2001), and Affection (2001). These moving titles speak to Martin’s desire for the experience of encountering her paintings to be an encompassing incidence of emotion, as she expressed in a 1993 interview: “I would like them to represent beauty, innocence and happiness; I would like them all to represent that. Exaltation.” [3]

1. Benita Eisler, “Life Lines” in The New Yorker, 25 January 1993, 70.
2. Hilton Als, “ (opens in a new window) The Heroic Art of Agnes Martin” in The New York Review of Books, 14 July 2016.
3. Irving Sandler, “Agnes Martin, Interviewed by Irving Sandler” in Art Monthly, 5 September 1993.

Marina Perez Simão

b. 1980, Vitória, Brazil

Richard Pousette-Dart

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

In the 1960s, Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart began painting in a pointillist technique coinciding with his interest in light. To create these works, Pousette-Dart applied dots of paint onto the canvas, often touching the paint tubes directly to the surface. In some works, he developed impastoed surfaces with multiple layers over several days or even years. Upon closer inspection, they contain a surprisingly broad spectrum of color emerging through dense constellations of pigment. Some reveal underlying patterns, while others are structured around defined circular forms—such as Implosion into the Firmament (1991–92)—evoking macroscopic and microscopic imagery. Completed the year Pousette-Dart died, the present work is a painterly testament to the artist’s deft use of light, color, and form. Awash with pixilated pastel hues, bands of color arc over a punctuated, radiating black mass in the center of the canvas—a visual representation of the firmament, or the symbolic Biblical dome dividing heaven and earth, body and spirit. As the artist poetically expressed: “Form seen through light, millions of points of life, is forever resolving and dissolving, growing and being born and dying, becoming and disappearing.” [1]

1. Richard Pousette-Dart, Notebook B 186, 1950–60, quoted in Martica Sawin, “Richard Pousette-Dart” in Richard Pousette-Dart: The Centennial (New York: Pace Gallery, 2016), 12.

Yto Barrada

b. 1971, Paris

Huong Dodinh

b. 1945, Soc Trang, Vietnam
Lives and works in Paris, France

Robert Longo

b. 1953, Brooklyn, New York

Kylie Manning

b. 1983, Juneau, Alaska

The themes of maternity and artistic parentage ripple through much of Kylie Manning's work, emerging in her new painting Montserrat (2023) as a meditation on an early figurative work by Mark Rothko, Portrait of Mary (1936), which itself distills Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (1668) into one solitary figure.

In a new essay spotlighting Montserrat, writer Ted Barrow explores Rothko's influence on Manning's painting.

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