Paris Photo

Past
Nov 10 – Nov 13, 2022
Paris

Art Fair Details:

Paris Photo
Grand Palais Ephémère
Booth C10
Nov 10 – 13, 2022

Press:

Press Release

Connect:

(opens in a new window) Paris Photo
(opens in a new window) @parisphotofair
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Staircase Dress, New York, 1994 © The Irving Penn Foundation

Pace Gallery is pleased to detail its participation in the 25th edition of Paris Photo 2022.

Showcasing the breadth of Pace’s photography program, the booth will feature a diverse selection of artists working across several disciplines. Spanning nearly seven decades, our presentation will include vintage masterworks from the 1950s by Irving Penn, Harry Callahan, and Robert Frank, together with new photographs by some of today’s foremost artists—Yto Barrada, Richard Learoyd, JR—many of whom are currently the subject of major exhibitions around the world.

New work by contemporary photographers will form an important component of the presentation. A section of the booth will be dedicated to JoAnn Verburg’s radiant landscapes, including examples of the artist’s signature diptychs that infuse the atmospheric compositions with spatial tension and visual pause. Also working in a multi-panel format, Rahim Fortune will present a nine-part piece titled Hardtack in collaboration with Sasha Wolf Projects. Comprised of black and white images taken between 2016 and 2022 in the American South, this will be the work’s public debut and forms part of a forthcoming artist monograph. Never-before-seen works from British photographer Paul Graham’s Verdigris series will also be on view, in which the artist pairs images of New Jersey park-goers gazing out on the post-industrial horizon with "corrupted" images of cherry blossoms.

Several of the artists included in Pace’s Paris Photo presentation work across multiple mediums, such as Kiki Smith, Lee Kun-Yong, Robert Rauschenberg, and Yto Barrada. The broad spectrum of work on view, from Smith’s cyanotypes to Lee’s performance-based suite of photographs, underscores the multi-disciplinary nature of Pace’s artist roster. Smith’s dreamlike compositions employ one of the earliest photographic techniques whereby images are imprinted onto light-sensitive paper to create delicate cyanotypes. These enthralling prints speak to the ways light shapes, distorts, clarifies, and blurs the world around us. A significant focus of Pace’s presentation is a collaborative body of work from 2021 by renowned photographer Paolo Roversi and pioneering textile artist Sheila Hicks. Long-time friends, Roversi and Hicks have both adopted Paris as their home, where they have created these extraordinary multimedia works in which Hicks evocatively sews, wraps, or adheres natural and synthetic fibers to the surface of Roversi’s ethereal photographic prints.

Key highlights of the booth include works by Trevor Paglen and Richard Misrach, both of whom are currently the subject of solo exhibitions at Pace’s Seoul and Geneva galleries respectively. Additionally, Paris Photo coincides with major institutional exhibitions of featured artists: Josef Koudelka: IKONAR. Archival Constellations at the Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Yto Barrada: Bad Color Combos at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands; JR: Chronicles at the Kunsthalle München, Germany; and Richard Learoyd’s inclusion in the 16th Lyon Bienniale.

Featured Works

Yto Barrada

b. 1971, Paris, France

Yto Barrada has described her practice as the space between poetry and politics; raised between her birthplace of Paris and Tangier, much of Barrada’s work interrogates family, history, borders, and anthropological practices.

The Snail (2009) derives from Barrada’s impulse to chronologize her personal history; this chromogenic photograph is from a series Barrada executed from 2002–11 in which she photographed natural and human-made scenes across Morocco, drawing attention to globalization and the remaking of Morocco to satisfy the demands of tourism rather than preserve its history and environment. This photograph is exemplary of Barrada’s tenacity in representing the topical geopolitical concerns around Morocco while resisting the easy logic of documentary photography. Barrada’s photographs unveil a highly personal, complex fidelity toward Morocco through unexpected, intimate compositions.

Rahim Fortune

b. 1994, Austin, Texas

Rahim Fortune is acclaimed for his arresting black and white images pose poignant questions around identity in the United States. Taken throughout Texas and the American South, Fortune’s photographs are often deeply personal, depicting formative sites and people in the artist’s life. Uniquely self-taught, Fortune explores nuanced racial dynamics in the United States; his father, the subject of Fortune’s 2021 collection of photographs “I can't stand to see you cry” is Black, while his mother was a member of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. Living between Texas and Brooklyn, Fortune documents his journeys through multivalent histories—his own, his parents’, and America’s troubled past—producing stunning images, which Andrea DenHoed wrote for The New Yorker contain “noirish moodiness” and “a touch of Old West kitsch.”

The artist states the following about this body of work:

For the past six years I have been photographing the long-enduring African American traditions in the region where central/east Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi meet. Collectively, the photographs are both a document and artistic statement. They depict lush scenes of Praise Dancers, Rodeo Queens, blues players and the landscapes these people inhabit. These photographs are a love letter to the place I grew up, and portray a multitude of subjects in one poetic sequence. This part of the country is home to much history and culture that has contributed to the creation of Americana and folklore; I hope to speak to the mythic quality of the culture in the Southeast and make a strong statement to my sustained passion and study of this geographic region, as well as the people who call it home. Within this work I hope to ascend any narrative around rural Black identity in America as one of simply servitude or oppression. Rather, I intend to highlight the boundless creativity and possibilities of the music and people who still contribute to this culture within a contemporary context.

Robert Frank

b. 1924, Zurich, Switzerland
d. 2019, Nova Scotia, Canada

Emmet Gowin

b. December 22, 1941

Photographed as Emmet Gowin flew over Benton County, an agricultural region in south-central Washington in the northwest United States, these striking aerial photographs attest to the ways in which humankind has overtly disfigured and continues to transform the landscape. In contrast to their visual dynamism and beauty, the images in the artist’s The One Hundred Circle Farm, the subject of both his 2022 exhibition at Pace Gallery and monograph of this year, are indices of urgent environmental issues, pointing to the ties between land destruction, water scarcity, and center-pivot agriculture. Ostensibly investigations of form and light, Gowin’s images remain inextricable from contemporary anxieties surrounding climate change, offering prophetic visions of humanity’s troubled relationship to and exploitation of the natural world. For Gowin, the circular formations he photographed in this series also allude to the language of the sacred, which transcends the specificities of a given time and place. The circle, Gowin notes, remains as “deeply human and profoundly attractive as worshiping the sun or the moon must have been for the peoples of prehistory.” Throughout his six-decade career, Gowin has captured images of landscapes around the world as well as intimate portraits of family members. His powerful and contemplative photographs offer meditations on the complexities of personhood and family, on humanity’s relationship to the natural world, and on industry’s toll on the Earth.

Paul Graham

b. 1956, United Kingdom

Verdigris—the green oxidation of weather beaten copper—completes a twelve-year sequence of works by Paul Graham on life’s transience and our mortality.

These three interconnected series began with Does Yellow Run Forever? showing his partner asleep, together with Irish rainbows and gold shops. Five years later came Mother—subtle, loving portraits of his aged mother in her final year on earth. Verdigris completes this informal trilogy with images of people looking to the horizon, paired with images of cherry blossoms—the embodiment of life’s fleeting path through transient beauty to its inevitable loss.

While the people are all clearly photographed as they stare at the boundless horizon, the blossoms images have been corrupted by the digital camera, unable to process its own images correctly. Setting the camera to its ultra resolution mode, which uses multiple micro-shifted exposures, it struggles to assemble the images due to the motion of a gentle breeze on the blossoms, resulting in a degraded ‘failed’ image. Graham embraces these corrupted images as reflective of the past years of pandemic; of the failure of technology to capture nature’s profound wondrousness; and of the transience of life’s beauty, with its inevitable depredation and demise.

All the images in Verdigris were taken in a single park in New Jersey in which Graham has worked for the past 6 years. The park is not especially remarkable, but it does have a hilltop view of the post-industrial landscape— freeways, railways, factories, bridges, power lines, with Newark city and airport in the distance. Visitors to the park, regardless of the season, stop to scan this horizon and its infinite prospect. The blossom images, taken during the brief springtime bloom of the park’s cherry trees, are entwined with the horizon seekers, along with a scattering of images of the park through the seasons, the trees, a buffalo sculpture, and the setting sun.

28 Millimètres, Women Are Heroes, Collage dans les rues de Monrovia, in the street of Monrovia, Liberia by JR JR — JR JR, *28 Millimètres, Women Are Heroes, Collage dans les rues de Monrovia, in the street of Monrovia, Liberia*, 2008, color print, mounted on dibond, mat plexiglas, flushed wooden black frame, 49-3/16" × 87-3/8" × 2-3/4" (124.9 cm × 221.9 cm × 7 cm)

JR

b. 1983, Paris

Lee Kun-Yong

b. 1942, Sariwon, Korea

These collections of photographs document Korean artist Lee Kun-Yong's pioneering performances from the second half of the 1970s, a period during which avant-garde arts in South Korea were repressed. Artists working outside the recognized categories of Western style oil painting, ink painting, and sculpture were denied any government support, and government surveillance and the suppression of civil rights were rampant. South Korea was under martial law at the direction of its president at the time in a mission to “protect” South Korea from Communist threats from across the northern border. It is no coincidence then, that Lee’s early performance works involved little more than the repetition of very basic actions that did not attract the attention of the state. Many performances were documented in a methodical way, acting as a visual manual which viewers could easily duplicate step-by- step. From the very beginning, Lee regarded documentation as an integral part of the expanded life of his artworks, and accordingly his photographs extend beyond simple reproduction of the live performance, becoming art objects with an entirely new set of conceptual parameters. Prior to performing Logic of Place in 1975, Lee executed the work in stages at Hongik University while Yi Wan-Ho, an artist and close associate, took a series of documentary photographs. While the performance itself has unquestionable significance, the original photographs taken prior to the official execution of Logic of Place demonstrate the impact of the documented image in his work. Lee’s exploration of the possibility of performance as a live medium, and one through which to address the uses of photography in Yushin Korea, positions him as a premier artist in Korea.

Richard Learoyd

b. 1966, Nelson, United Kingdom

Irving Penn

b. 1917, Plainfield, New Jersey
d. 2009, New York

Irving Penn’s Two in a Canoe, Long Island (1954) prints stand alone in his oeuvre for their unique composition and coloring. These early works demonstrate an inventive technique of producing pigment on porcelain prints, made using a sophisticated, bespoke process widely known as either gum dichromate or gum bichromate. In this process, gelatin is used in place of gum arabic as the vehicle in which the pigment was suspended. Given that he made multicolor works, the prints endured numerous coatings and water baths; this is most likely the reason he elected to use dimensionally stable porcelain-coated steel—no multicolor pigment prints were made on paper. Each pigment used was suspended in gelatin in an airbrush jar. Penn handled the jar with a special heated glove he created to ensure that the gelatin remained in a liquid state, allowing it to be sprayed onto the substrate. After this coating dried, the negative for that color was placed on it in perfect registration, exposed to ultraviolet light, and developed in water, leaving those parts not covered by the negative exposed and washed away. Each layer of pigmented coating was developed before the next was applied. As a result of this involved process, each print is unique and impossible to replicate. Individual prints were labeled with a full list of colors, and Penn would hand-draw a line through those colors not used for that particular print. These Two in a Canoe, Long Island prints are exceptional for their complexity and for their demonstration of Penn’s early-career investigations of color and processes.

(no title) by Roversi, Paolo/Hicks, Sheila — Roversi, Paolo/Hicks, Sheila, *(no title)*, 2021, pigment print with applied natural fibers, wood, 18-1/2" × 14-9/16" × 2-1/8" (47 cm × 37 cm × 5.4 cm), overall

Sheila Hicks

Paolo Roversi

b. September 25, 1947

Kiki Smith

American, b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany

Kiki Smith’s swirling Force works are inspired by aerial views of hurricanes, their blue-hued, hypnotic beauty in contradistinction to the destructive power of these storms. These works are exemplary of Smith’s decades-long exploration of printmaking. In recent years, the artist has introduced cyanotypes—also referred to as blueprints for their unique Prussian blue color—into her practice. Smith’s Force works reflect a hybrid process of etching and cyanotype; she uses a needle to make etchings in Plexiglass, using these plates as contact prints which are then exposed in a photographic process onto chemical-coated paper. Her fine etchings are at once meticulous and weightless, gyrating with the gestural vitality and dreaminess of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889). These Force works are indicative of Smith’s career-spanning exploration of nature, revealing the deep and spiritual interconnectivity of people, animals, and the earth itself. Smith’s Force works were first exhibited at the 2021 Prospect Triennial in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city memorably devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Feathery and ethereal, her etchings allude to the havoc wrought by hurricanes on regions adjacent to the Atlantic basin, and the increasing threat that these calamitous storms pose as climate change escalates their intensity. Smith’s engagement with this pressing environmental concern is in concert with the totality of her oeuvre, which confronts and questions humankind’s role in the natural world.

JoAnn Verburg

b. June 9, 1950

JoAnn Verburg’s present photographs are contemplative and experiential, exemplifying the renowned American photographer’s multidisciplinary practice, which for over four decades has engaged with a range of art- historical traditions, including still life and portraiture. These works are drawn from her series depicting olive trees on three continents, in California, Israel, and Italy. Generating what the artist has called an “imagined reality,” her images become vehicles for orchestrating a performative and existential encounter between the viewer and the world. Catalyzed by a 2016 earthquake in Spoleto, Italy, where the artist resides part-time, Verburg began to consider the region’s olive trees with a new perspective, contemplating their endurance and longevity in relation to her own, as well as the tempo of their lifecycles in relation to those of birds, rocks, mountains, and other natural beings and elements around her. Verburg’s complex compositions depend entirely on the presence of the viewer. “In that sense,” Verburg has explained, “they are like portraits. It’s as though the person in the gallery has just stepped out of the frame and turned around to see the trees and sky behind.” A photograph, for her, “only exists when someone is looking at it,” so that “the air in the image seems to be the same air that’s in the gallery...there is no difference.