Pace at Zona Maco

Zona Maco

Past
Feb 5 – Feb 9, 2025
Mexico City
 
ART FAIR DETAILS

Zona Maco
Centro Citibanamex
Booth C118
February 5 – 9, 2025

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Above: Installation View, Pace Gallery, Zona Maco, 2025, Booth C118 © Pace Gallery
Pace Gallery is pleased to announce details of its presentation at Zona Maco in Mexico City from February 5 – 9, 2025.

The gallery’s booth (#C118) will feature a unique architectural design inspired by Luis Barragán’s vibrant, modernist structures in Mexico City. Focusing on color, light, and space, Pace’s booth will showcase works by Peter Alexander, Mary Corse, Dan Flavin, and James Turrell. Pace’s booth will also spotlight portraits of Frida Kahlo by Julian Schnabel. Works by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Tara Donovan, Elmgreen & Dragset, Alicja Kwade, Roberto Matta, Marina Perez Simão, and Arlene Shechet will also figure prominently in the gallery’s presentation at the fair.

Highlights on Pace’s booth at Zona Maco include:

A 2018 Needle sculpture, measuring eight feet tall, by Peter Alexander, a major figure in the California Light and Space movement who explored the phenomenological effects of color throughout his life and career

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s 2024 painting Fiera, which depicts an undulating, otherworldly landscape inspired by the history, folklore, and spirit of the Caribbean

A 2024 Diamond painting by Mary Corse, who, over the course of her six-decade career, has continually investigated the ways in which light can be both subject and material

Stratagem III (2024), a sculpture made entirely of found, scavenged, and upcycled CD-ROM discs by Tara Donovan

A sculpture, titled Couple, Fig. 12 (2016), by the duo Elmgreen & Dragset, who will have a solo show at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery in fall 2025

A 1969 sculpture by Dan Flavin, who explored the relationships between light and different kinds of architectural spaces with his fluorescent works

Matter-Mind (2024), a stone, patinated bronze, and concrete sculpture by Alicja Kwade, whose work engages poetically and critically with scientific and philosophical concepts

Roberto Matta’s painting Ré-veille ton contraire (1970), a colorful composition that speaks to the surrealist’s profound influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism

A large-scale 2024 painting by Marina Perez Simão, whose semi-abstract landscapes are made up of vibrant, undulating forms

Julian Schnabel’s portraits of Frida Kahlo rendered in oil paint and plate fragments

A 2023 glazed ceramic and powder coated steel sculpture from Arlene Shechet’s Together series, a body of work that the artist began during the COVID-19 pandemic to find ways that art and color can provide visual and spiritual nourishment in times of upheaval and uncertainty

Non Descript, Circular Glass, an installation created by James Turrell, who has dedicated his career to investigating the materiality of light, in 2021

 

Featured Works

James Turrell, Non Descript, Circular Glass, 2021, LED light, etched glass and shallow space, 52-inch diameter Runtime: 2 hours 30 minutes

James Turrell

b. 1943, Los Angeles

Mary Corse, Untitled (Blue Diamond with Black Inner Band), 2024, glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas, 92" × 92" × 4" (233.7 cm × 233.7 cm × 10.2 cm)

Mary Corse

b. 1945, Berkeley, California

Alicja Kwade, Matter-Mind, 2024, stone, patinated bronze, concrete, 166 cm × 120.7 cm × 139 cm (65-3/8" × 47-1/2" × 54-3/4")

Alicja Kwade

b. 1979, Katowice, Poland
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Alicja Kwade’s Matter-Mind (2024) exemplifies her ongoing exploration of the relationship between physical reality and human perception. A bronze staircase—emblematic of movement, transition, and the passage of time—partitions the two segments of a substantial boulder, a symbol of permanence. The staircase, a manufactured object, suggests a progression, while the boulder anchors the work in the immutable forces of nature.

This juxtaposition between the organic and the artificial reflects Kwade’s broader practice, which often examines the boundaries between natural forces and human-made constructs. Across her oeuvre, the artist explores transformations between states of matter, using these shifts to highlight the tension between permanence and impermanence, as well as the fluid boundaries between the physical and metaphysical worlds. Matter-Mind builds on this inquiry by cleaving and connecting the two elements. By uniting these paradoxical forces—permanence and flux—in Matter-Mind, she creates a visual and conceptual tension, inviting the viewer to contemplate humanity’s transient existence within the context of nature’s vast, unyielding framework. The interplay of dualities is a hallmark of Kwade’s practice, bridging physical and metaphysical realities.

Robert Indiana, AMOR, 1998-2001, Conceived: 1998; Executed: 2001, polished bronze, 18" × 18" × 9" (45.7 cm × 45.7 cm × 22.9 cm)

Robert Indiana

b. 1928, New Castle, Indiana
d. 2018, Vinalhaven, Maine

Julian Schnabel, Second of the Two Fridas, 2024-2025, oil, plates and bondo on aluminum, 60" × 48" (152.4 cm × 121.9 cm)

Julian Schnabel

b. 1951, Brooklyn, New York

Julian Schnabel first encountered the work of Frida Kahlo as a sixteen-year-old while driving through Mexico in the summer of 1968. At Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno, he saw The Two Fridas (1939), a double self-portrait of two Fridas seated side by side, one in a traditional Tehuana dress with an exposed, bleeding heart, and the other in a European-style gown, connected by a shared artery against a stormy sky. After seeing this painting, he felt like she was an unsung hero. Kahlo painted The Two Fridas amidst her divorce from Diego Rivera; one of the Fridas holds a small amulet with a portrait of him. In four new portraits of Frida, Schnabel reinterprets the Mexican painter’s canonical work.
In two of his portraits, Schnabel separates the two Fridas into distinct compositions, each on panels of broken dishes, creating a double metaphor for fragmentation: the image itself is split in two parts, and this division is further emphasized by the fractured surfaces of the plates, building on the symbolism of the rupture in Kahlo’s marriage and personal identity. Two other depictions of Frida highlight her prominent features and direct, arresting gaze, distinctive characteristics of her self-portraiture. Since his first plate paintings in 1978—an innovative break from the prevailing austerity of Minimalism at the time—Schnabel has continued to find new ways to use this medium, portraying friends, artists, flowers, scenes from his travels, and, notably, self-portraits. His reinterpretation of Kahlo’s The Two Fridas bridges Kahlo’s deeply personal work with his own introspective practice of self-portraiture, layering homage with mutual vulnerability.

Arlene Shechet, Together: Night Sky, 2024, glazed ceramic, powder coated steel, 25-3/4" × 17-1/2" × 11" (65.4 cm × 44.5 cm × 27.9 cm)

Arlene Shechet

b. 1951, New York, New York

Roberto Matta, L’éternité hors du moi, 1996, oil on canvas, 40-5/8" × 34-3/4" (103.2 cm × 88.3 cm)

Matta

b. 1911, Santiago, Chile
d. 2002, Civitavecchia, Italy

Roberto Matta’s Ré-veille ton contraire (1970), translating from French to “awaken your opposite,” is populated by biomorphic forms merging with and clashing against mechanical elements. Typical of Matta’s works from the 1950’s through to his late style, themes of capitalism and machinery are present in Ré-veille ton contraire, though these tensions are offset by the lush beauty of his surrealist approach. Matta’s work always began with an exercise in “automatic painting,” a surrealist technique meant to bypass conscious control, resulting here in a hazy sunset-hued atmospheric backdrop. In the foreground, android figures emerge from and recede into a roiling blue-black cloud, evoking his earlier "inscapes” of the 40s, which sought to map the mind’s inner architecture. Matta's works demonstrate a remarkable relationship to space, reflecting his architectural studies in Chile and subsequent apprenticeship under Le Corbusier, before he shifted his focus to painting. This spatial awareness conveys a sense of vastness, even within the intimate scale of Ré-veille ton contraire. Matta inverted the palette of Ré-veille ton contraire more than two decades later in L’éternité hors du moi (1996), or “eternity outside the self.” Here, a single humanoid figure with outstretched arms occupies the majority of the painting’s frame. This single figure, a totemic embodiment of continuity and connection between the self and the collective unconscious, recurs throughout Matta’s career and can be traced back to paintings of the 1940’s.

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Fiera, 2024, oil on linen, 80" × 72" (203.2 cm × 182.9 cm)

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello

b. 1990, Havana, Cuba

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s Fiera (2024) is a surreal technicolor landscape informed by the artist’s study of Caribbean mythologies. The painting draws from the lyrics of the Cuban musical group Muñequitos de Matanzas’s song “Lamento Esclavo,” or “Slave Lament,” which imagines the story of an African man who escapes from a slave ship into the mountains of Cuba. As Piñeiro Bello explains, the brutality and dehumanization of slavery strip this man of his former identity, transforming him into a fiera—a wild animal in human form, untethered from the constraints of civilization and deeply entwined with the natural world. In Fiera, Piñeiro Bello channels this transformation through a hypnotic, otherworldly landscape. The painting itself becomes a fiera, alive with the pulse of untamed energy. Twin moons rise above a dense, swirling forest, their reflections shimmering on the sea below. The composition feels almost sentient, each element—sky, water, and earth— vibrating with vitality. Piñeiro Bello’s oeuvre is deeply rooted in examining the legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean and the enduring experiences of the Caribbean diaspora, from the violent uprooting of African peoples through the transatlantic slave trade, to the creation of hybrid identities forged through survival and resistance. He narrativizes these experiences through kaleidoscopic dreamscapes where the boundaries between history, myth, and memory dissolve and reconfigure into ghostly iridescent hues and undulating forms.

Sonia Gomes, Untitled | Sem título, 2022, collage and mixed media on cotton paper and natural fiber, 23-1/4" × 16-1/8" (59.1 cm × 41 cm)

Sonia Gomes

b. 1948, Caetanópolis
Lives and works in São Paulo

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Binocular Tension, 2024, flat display, 3D sensor, computer, wooden frame, custom code written in Python, 46-1/16" × 16-1/8" × 4-3/4" (117 cm × 41 cm × 12.1 cm), framed display

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

b. 1967, Mexico City

Mika Tajima, Art d'Ameublement (Kudryavzeva), 2024, spray acrylic, thermoformed PETG, 90" × 67" (228.6 cm × 170.2 cm)

Mika Tajima

b. 1975, Los Angeles

Elmgreen & Dragset, Couple, Fig. 12, 2016, MDF, PVC, aluminum, stainless steel, 86-5/8" × 18-7/8" × 12-5/8" (220 cm × 47.9 cm × 32.1 cm), each

Elmgreen & Dragset

Michael Elmgreen | b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark
Ingar Dragset | b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway

Elmgreen & Dragset’s Couple series incorporates a swimming pool motif, making these works signature sculptures by the artist duo. The two diving boards are identical except for their colors, reflecting the artists’ use of doubled geometry—placing objects in pairs or mirroring them—a nod to their two decades-long collaboration. The title follows the “Fig.” numbering system used by the artists to link works, as in their Powerless Structures series—in this case the connection is between the two boards, called Couple. The series also refers to an early sculptural work, Powerless Structures, Fig. 11 (1997), in which a diving board penetrated a panoramic window at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, and later shown in a new version at Punta della Dogana, François Pinault Foundation, Venice, in 2015. The series also relates to Van Gogh’s Ear, a 30-foot-tall upright swimming pool sculpture displayed at New York's Rockefeller Center in 2016 by Public Art Fund. The artists drew inspiration in part from David Hockney’s paintings and Ed Ruscha’s photos of swimming pools. Seemingly readymades, the diving boards in the Couple series are actually handcrafted in every detail. Like Van Gogh’s Ear, the diving boards are presented vertically, becoming sculptural objects akin to paintings. The negation of functionality in Elmgreen & Dragset's work shifts the focus of the viewer’s relationship to an object, from physical and interactive, to emotional or cerebral.

John Wesley, Untitled (Single Bird), 1973, acrylic on Canvas, 24" × 36" (61 cm × 91.4 cm)

John Wesley

b. 1928, Los Angeles
d. 2022, New York

To inquire about any of the artists or works featured here, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.