West Bund Art & Design

Past
Nov 9 – Nov 12, 2023
Shanghai

Art Fair Details:

West Bund Art & Design
West Bund Art Center
Booth A129
Nov 9 – 12, 2022

Press:

Press Release

Connect:

(opens in a new window) West Bund
(opens in a new window) @westbundartfair
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Peter Alexander, Cat's Meow, 2020 © Peter Alexander

Pace Gallery is pleased to announce details of its presentation for the 2023 edition of West Bund Art & Design.

The gallery’s booth will spotlight paintings, sculptures, and photography by international, intergenerational artists across its program, with leading Chinese figures Hong Hao, Mao Yan, Qiu Xiaofei, Song Dong, Sui Jianguo, Yin Xiuzhen, and Zhang Xiaogang among them. Works by these and other artists—including Elmgreen & Dragset, Kevin Francis Gray, Brice Guilbert, JR,Trevor Paglen, Adam Pendleton, Kiki Smith, and Hiroshi Sugimoto—will be exhibited alongside sculptures by Peter Alexander and Joel Shapiro and paintings by Mary Corse and Hermann Nitsch.

Highlights in Pace’s West Bund Art & Design presentation include evocative abstract paintings by Hermann Nitsch, a co-founder of the Viennese Actionism movement who died in 2022 at age 83. Among Nitsch’s works on the gallery’s booth is Schüttbild (2014), a composition that reflects the artist’s intense interest in the intersection of painting and performance as well as the visceral power of abstraction. West Bund Art & Design will coincide with an exhibition dedicated to Nitsch—and his relationship to Claude Monet’s Water Lilies—presented by the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris from October 11, 2023 through February 12, 2024.

The booth will also prominently feature the vibrant, wall-mounted sculpture Cat’s Meow (2020) by the late Light and Space artist Peter Alexander—whose work will be the subject of a spring 2024 exhibition at Pace’s Hong Kong gallery; new paintings by Adam Pendleton, who is presenting the solo exhibition To Divide By at the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri through January 15, 2024; and a 2022 painting by Mary Corse, who challenges viewers’ perceptions and phenomenological experiences of light through her innovative practice.

The gallery’s booth at the fair will also spotlight new paintings by Zhang Xiaogang and Brice Guilbert, whose solo exhibition Ti brulé is on view at Pace’s Hong Kong gallery from November 3 to December 7; a selection of works from Hong Hao’s The Realm of Matters series; and works on paper by Kiki Smith, Qiu Xiaofei, and Mao Yan, who is presenting a solo exhibition at Song Art Museum in Beijing through December 20, 2023.

In the way of sculpture, the gallery’s booth will include a 2022 steel and lacquer sculpture by the duo Elmgreen & Dragset; mixed media sculptures from Yin Xiuzhen’s the Surging Waves Chronicles series; glass sculptures by Song Dong; works in bronze and wood by Joel Shapiro, who has ceaselessly explored the medium’s capacity to alter one’s sense of space, scale, and physicality; and new artwork created by Sui Jianguo using high-definition 3D scanning and printing technologies to capture and document the contours of his hands.

Featured Works

Kiki Smith

b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany

Kiki Smith’s life-size drawing Surrounding (2009) was created for the 2010 exhibition Sojourn at The Brooklyn Museum, New York. The central figure is an adolescent girl with long hair seated in a chair, her impassive gaze fixed directly upon the viewer. A wreath-like bouquet of green leaves resting on the girl’s lap is the sole burst of color in the otherwise muted composition. These leaves, notably the only detail not meticulously drawn, appear as if they were applied using a sponge cut into leaf shapes and then dipped in paint, reminiscent of a child’s craft project. In an interview with Art Observed, Smith explained that many elements of the works in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition were “made using techniques I learnt in nursery... I like the majority of my works to be accessible in terms of how they are made. I do not believe in inherent [artistic] ability.” [1] Sojourn featured more than sixty works revolving around the female life cycle, including physical, mental, and emotional events between birth and death. Smith drew inspiration from Prudence Punderson’s needlework The First, Second and Last Scenes of Mortality (1776–83) which showed the birth, life, and death of a woman. Importantly, Punderson’s work included elements of craft and creativity
as integral components of a woman’s life, shifting the focus away from the traditional emphasis on marriage and family. Surrounding underscores the artist’s profound interest in nature and the role of creative expression as a pivotal aspect of feminine growth and identity.

1. “ (opens in a new window) Go See-New York: Kiki Smith’s ‘Sojourn’ at the Brooklyn Museum through September 12, 2010,” Art Observed, 12 February 2010

Hiroshi Sugimoto, *Sea of Buddha*, 1995, gelatin silver prints, 16-1/2" x 21-3/16" (41.9 cm x 53.8 cm), three prints each

Hiroshi Sugimoto

b. 1948, Tokyo, Japan

In Kyoto’s Sanjūsangen-dō (the Hall of Thirty-Three Bays), a temple constructed under the order of Emperor Go-Shirakawa in 1164, one thousand gold-leaf covered cypress statues of Senjū Kannon—or “Thousand-Armed Merciful Bodhisattava Avalokitesvara”—are arranged geometrically. For one hour each morning, the east-facing building is bathed in sunlight that, as Hiroshi Sugimoto describes, diffuses across the statues, causing the “sculptures and the architecture [to] come together in a moment of climax.” [1] Sugimoto’s Sea of Buddha (1995) captures the infinite radiance of these nearly 900-year-old statues, which appear as though in a hall of mirrors, expanding boundlessly beyond the borders of the photographs. Sugimoto began working with images from Sanjūsangen-dō in 1988, after spending seven years seeking permission from the monks. The artist worked with images captured at Sanjūsangen-dō for 20 years, producing his Sea of Buddha series as well as his first video, Accelerated Buddha (1997). The triptych of images that comprise the present work are gelatin silver prints, a medium that the largely self-taught artist has mastered through years of study in mixing his own chemicals. He cites American photographer Ansel Adams as inspiration for the sharpness of the contrast in his images, explaining that the tonal variation between black and white in Sea of Buddha evokes the cyclicality of life: “I also identify black and white as the colors of life and death, going back and forth. A similar concept is imparted in the Sea of Buddha installation...One thousand Buddhas become a million. They rotate from life to death and from death to life. Endlessly.” [2]

1. Hiroshi Sugimoto, “ (opens in a new window) Hiroshi Sugimoto with Phong Bui,” in The Brooklyn Rail, March 2016
2. Ibid.

Hermann Nitsch

b. 1938, Vienna, Austria
d. 2022, Mistelbach, Austria

Hermann Nitsch’s richly tactile Schüttbild (2014) was executed July 9, 2014, as part of the artist’s 69th Painting Action (Aktion) at his home of Prinzendorf Castle, Austria. These Aktions performances, the first of which took place in November 1960, belong to Nitsch’s Das Orgian Mysterien Theater (The Orgies Mysteries Theater)—more than 100 Aktions that involved components ranging from macabre to sexual to hysterical. Schüttbild is exemplary of the paintings that emerged from these saturnalian rituals, which were sometimes composed of animal blood; acrylic paint, as in the present work; or a mixture of two. The title comes from the German schütteln (verb: to shake, vibrate, agitate; to jolt or toss), and displays the trademarks of these active painting experiences, at the inflection point of violence and revelry. Sanguine shades of dark reddish-brown are splattered across the canvas in Schüttbild, and where there is dense paint, the artist pressed in swirl and line patterns with his fingers. In this frenzied red-brown composition, Nitsch replaces the blood and guts in his theatrical performances with paint, and in the bodily intimacy of his finger marks, creates a painting centered around carnal desire, pain, and ecstasy.

Peter Alexander

b. 1939, Los Angeles, California

Peter Alexander’s sculpture Cat’s Meow (2020) is comprised of seven vertical translucent urethane bars across a tonal range including navy, saffron, and maroon. These bars are installed at slightly uneven heights, exhibiting varying widths with pronounced bulging centers and razor-thin edges, evoking a sense of radiating light hovering above the wall. Around 2014, Alexander discovered that urethane, in contrast to materials he had employed in his early career such as resin and polyester, has a unique property of faithfully retaining color without distortion. Furthermore, its translucency enriches hues in a manner that deeply intrigued the artist. This revelation prompted him to explore the emotional responses elicited by color and their origins, as well as the effects that arise when stacking one color adjacent to another. Cat’s Meow draws inspiration from the light installations of Robert Irwin and from the paintings of Mark Rothko. “The bars provide an extraordinary quality of color and I see them almost like stripe paintings, where you put a group next to each other and something happens,” the artist explains. “You don’t put just any one next to each other but there’s combos at work. Really what it was is, I’ve always loved Rothko, or loved the sensibility there, and so I just decided to cast an object that had those kind of edges, the disappear like all the other edges I have.” [1] Alexander’s relentless experimentation with tone, material, and light firmly establishes him as a pioneering figure within the Light and Space Movement.

1. Peter Alexander, “ (opens in a new window) Peter Alexander: Sculpture 1966–2016: A Career Survey,” Eric Minh Swenson for Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, posted on October 29, 2016, YouTube Video, 3:10.

Adam Pendleton

b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia

A new work from multidisciplinary artist Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT) (2023) belongs to his series of the same name begun in 2019. Works from this series exist at the intersection of private introspection and public consumption— calling on viewers to decipher the richly layered letters and words on the canvas and engaging with questions surrounding individual versus collective. Untitled (WE ARE NOT) comprises drips, sprays, and spatters of black ink on canvas, invoking the immediacy of graffiti. Arranged haphazardly, the screen-printed letters reveal, upon close inspection, the abstracted title of the work within itself. Pendleton’s process begins with a “spray paint original,” in which he sprays variations of the letters that make up the words “WE ARE NOT,” a phrase drawn from his Black Dada series, onto the canvas. He uses silkscreen to apply ink to the canvas, creating blurry fields of positive and negative space, foreground and background, and visual depth. Pendleton’s most recent works call on us, suggesting that defining what we are not may help us define who we are.