TEFAF New York

Past
May 12 – May 16, 2023

Art Fair Details:

TEFAF New York
Booth 301
May 12 – 16, 2023

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Pace is pleased to announce that Louise Nevelson will be the subject of a single artist presentation at the 2023 edition of TEFAF New York.

On view from May 12 to 16 at the Park Avenue Armory, the gallery’s booth will showcase collages created by Louise Nevelson between the 1950s and 1980s in dialogue with her iconic small-scale sculptures from the same periods.

The 11 collages included in Pace’s presentation this year at TEFAF speak to an aspect of Nevelson’s practice that she kept mostly to herself during her lifetime. Employing a range of materials, both new and found—including metallic foil, cardboard, sandpaper, tape, wood, spray paint and newspaper—these works reflect the artist’s intense interest in materiality, composition, and process. Collage provided a new avenue for Nevelson’s explorations of light, shadow, and reflection.

Collage, for Nevelson, was a language of radical honesty in which materials laid bare the stories of their origins. Tearing and re-combining traces of the past to produce raw, unfiltered beauty, Nevelson developed an aesthetic of fragmentation and re-assembly that animated the spirit of all her work as an artist. The constellations and combinations of varied materials and forms in Nevelson’s collages shed light on the artist’s process of formal experimentation, which informed her important contributions to the history of sculpture and the development of what would come to be called “installation.”

In the economy of Nevelson’s studio, the collage works illuminate new dimensions of the creative sensibility that gave rise to her monochromatic painted sculptures. Pace’s TEFAF presentation will feature five black-painted wooden sculptures by the artist. Among these works are Rainforest Night Presence Column (1967), in which Nevelson situated her abstract forms atop one another as part of a four-foot-tall columnar structure; Sky Enclosure XI (1973), a work that reflects the artist’s interest in enactments of compartmentalization; and the intimately scaled Small Cities IX (1978-85).

Pace has represented Nevelson, with whom the gallery’s Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher maintained a lifelong friendship, since 1963. The artist’s first solo exhibition with Pace in 1961 has been followed by numerous presentations dedicated to her expansive practice at the gallery’s international locations. In the decades following Nevelson’s death in 1988, Pace has worked closely with the Nevelson estate and the Louise Nevelson Foundation.

Pace’s presentation at TEFAF New York will come on the heels of a recent solo exhibition dedicated to Nevelson at the gallery’s Los Angeles space. It also follows a landmark exhibition of Nevelson’s work presented last year within the historic rooms of the Procuratie Vecchie in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, an official collateral event of the Venice Biennale. The first major show dedicated to Nevelson’s work in Italy since 2013, this exhibition was curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson, whose monographic book on the artist will be released by Yale University Press in June.

An exhibition of more than 50 works by Nevelson will open at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas on August 27. On view through January 7, 2024, The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury will spotlight Nevelson’s monumental legacy in postwar American art and culture.

The gallery’s upcoming showing at TEFAF builds on its history of bringing carefully curated solo booths to the Park Avenue Armory, where Pace has mounted presentations dedicated to Jean Dubuffet, as part of TEFAF New York 2019; Adam Pendleton, as part of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) Art Show in 2020; Alfred Jensen, Tony Smith, and Thomas Nozkowski at the ADAA Art Show in 2019, 2018, and 2017, respectively; and other artists.

During the run of TEFAF New York, solo exhibitions by artists Nigel Cooke, Matthew Day Jackson, Grada Kilomba, Maysha Mohamedi, and Trevor Paglen—as well as the Nina Simone Childhood Home Auction Exhibition—will be on view at Pace’s Chelsea galleries. Following TEFAF, Pace will present a solo exhibition of work by Robert Nava at Frieze New York 2023.

Featured Works

Sky Enclosure XI by Louise Nevelson — Louise Nevelson, *Sky Enclosure XI*, 1973, wood painted black, 26" × 9-1/8" × 5-3/4" (66 cm × 23.2 cm × 14.6 cm)

Louise Nevelson once declared: “The way I think is collage.” For Nevelson, collage was a constant part of her life in the studio. Over the course of her six-decade career, both the term and the concept of collage remained transmutable, describing not only the artist’s approach to her work but to the world around her. Collage was both an artistic strategy and a state of being, but it was also an activity that Nevelson pursued largely in private. From the mid-1950s until her death, the artist created dozens of collages in parallel with her better-known sculptures, installations, and wall reliefs, yet she rarely exhibited them. These endlessly inventive compositions of torn, fragmented, discarded and recombined materials in two-dimensions belong to the lineage of Picasso’s Cubist collages, Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivism, and the wood constructions of Kurt Schwitters, while inventing an entirely new language of abstraction.

As with her sculptures and installations, Nevelson drew from discarded materials. The child of a lumberjack turned junkyard owner, Nevelson exercised a lifelong affinity for wood and scrap materials. Whereas her sculptures tended to make use of anonymous materials that were reduced to formal elements through the application of monochrome paint, Nevelson’s collage practice is exceptional within her oeuvre for utilizing the actual colors and textures of the found materials. Many of the items contained in her collages are household and personal effects, including gold-and silver-coated cigarette papers, jewelry box liners, pins, feathers, sandpaper, lace, foil, tile, and newsprint. The collages are perhaps where the domestic quality of Nevelson’s work is most present, drawing the viewer into a private interiority that contrasts the stoic monumentality of so much of her oeuvre.

Untitled by Louise Nevelson — Louise Nevelson, *Untitled*, 1961, foil, ink, paint, and paper on board, 36" x 23-3/4" (91.4 cm x 60.3 cm) 37" × 25" × 2" (94 cm × 63.5 cm × 5.1 cm), frame

Nevelson’s celebrated sculptural practice is epitomized by her work in monochromatic wood assemblage, usually in black, and occasionally white or gold. “For me, the black contains the silhouette, the essence of the universe,” Nevelson once explained. By contrast, her collages embrace the rawness of the material’s history. Art historian Pia Gottschaller has likened “the application of paint to adding a layer of protective skin,” explaining that while most of Nevelson’s sculptural oeuvre from the 1950s onward bears this protective layer, her collages—which she began in 1958 and continued to create until her death in 1988—are unconcealed, exposing intimate objects and providing a rare glimpse into her interior life. Yet the collages were also like drawings; they allowed Nevelson to work out ideas that were later translated into her sculptures. Extraordinary in their own right, the posthumous exposure of Nevelson’s collages has been a revelation both because of the quality and inventiveness of her approach to materials and form, but also because of the way they served as a laboratory for her sculptural imagination.

Rainforest Night Presence Column by Louise Nevelson

About the Artist

Louise Nevelson, a leading sculptor of the twentieth century, pioneered site- specific and installation art. She is recognized for her sculptures comprised of discarded furniture and other wood elements found in the area surrounding her studio.

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