Louise Nevelson

The Fourth Dimension

On View
Apr 11 – May 17, 2025
Seoul

Pace is pleased to present Louise Nevelson: The Fourth Dimension, an exhibition of sculpture and works on paper by the renowned American artist, at its Seoul gallery. On view from April 11 to May 17, this focused presentation will feature a selection of Nevelson’s rarely-exhibited wall reliefs in black painted wood from the 1960s and 1970s, shown in dialogue with her intimate and enigmatic collages of the 1950s through the 1980s.

The first-ever solo exhibition of Nevelson’s work in Seoul, this exhibition will shed light on the centrality of collage to the artist’s process, tracing her lifetime of rigorous formal experimentation and exploring her metaphysical focus on shadow, which she described as “the fourth dimension.” Louise Nevelson: The Fourth Dimension is presented on the occasion of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions of work by major 20th century artists—with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships—at its spaces around the world.

Rooted in the legacies of Cubism and Constructivism, Nevelson’s artworks were widely celebrated during her lifetime for incorporating unexpected combinations of materials and forms. As part of her distinctive approach to abstraction, the artist often investigated the visual possibilities of compartmentalized elements and forms, a strategy that recurs across her sculpture, assemblage, collage, and jewelry making. Throughout her career, Nevelson nurtured an artistic practice marked by tireless and vigorous experimentation with materiality, shape, and space. Shadows are a recurrent focus in Nevelson’s artistic language. “I think that the shadow, let's say, for a better word, is the fourth dimension,” she explained. “That shadow I make forms out of is just not a fleeting shadow but it has as much form as a cubistic form would have. It has forms and I give them forms and to me they're much more exciting than anything that I see on earth.”

The artist’s daily act of creating abstractions in her collages, which she kept mostly secret during her lifetime, provided a new avenue for explorations of the texture and density of shadow as a function of light, reflection, and line. Inextricably linked with her sculptural practice, these works—which incorporate combinations of metal, cardboard, sandpaper, tape, wood, wire, spray paint, printed paper, and newspaper—reflect her intense interest in materiality. Collage, for Nevelson, was a language of radical honesty in which materials laid bare the stories of their origins. Tearing and recombining traces of the past to produce a raw, unfiltered beauty, she developed an aesthetic of fragmentation and reassembly that animated the spirit of all her work as an artist.

Nevelson’s work in collage—an intensely personal and private mode of expression that she treated almost like drawing—began in the early 1950s and continued throughout her career. In the economy of her studio, the collage works emerged as extensions of the same creative gesture that gave rise to her monochromatic, painted sculptures. The artist used store-bought Krylon spray-paint to transform everyday objects and bits of wooden detritus into abstract geometric forms—the negative traces these spray-painted objects left on scraps of paper and cardboard would become graphic elements in her collages. Singular and idiosyncratic, Nevelson’s collages draw from the rich legacy of modernist collage cultivated by Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, and other figures. Aside from a few haphazard appearances and the occasional studio photograph, the collages remained mostly unknown until after the artist’s death in 1988.

Pace’s upcoming exhibition in Seoul will situate Nevelson’s collages in dialogue with her wall reliefs in black painted wood, bringing together two aspects of her practice that have seldom been considered in relation to one another. Among these larger-scale works, made up of scavenged and reclaimed wooden elements, is a rarely seen composition from 1965.

Since Nevelson’s death there has been a series of radical re-appraisals of her work, especially as new frameworks and dialogues in art history have emerged in recent years. The gallery’s upcoming presentation in Seoul coincides with a global upswell of interest in her work, which is underscored by a forthcoming retrospective of the artist organized by the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France this fall. This spring, ahead of the Pompidou-Metz's show, solo exhibitions of Nevelson's work will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. In 2022, a sprawling exhibition of her work, Louise Nevelson: Persistence—curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Columbia University professor and author of Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale University Press, 2023)—was presented as an official collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale, and her work was also included in the main exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani.

Pace presented its first solo show of work by Nevelson in 1961 in Boston, and it has represented the artist—with whom the gallery’s Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher maintained a decades-long friendship—since 1963. In the decades since Nevelson’s passing, the gallery has worked closely with the Nevelson estate and cultivated a fruitful relationship with the Louise Nevelson Foundation. Opening during Pace’s 65th anniversary year, this forthcoming Nevelson exhibition in Seoul reflects the artist’s enduring and deeply personal relationship with Glimcher, and her indelible place in the gallery's history and its ethos today.

Throughout 2025, Pace is celebrating its 65th anniversary year with 16 exhibitions of work by artists who have been central to its program for decades. Presented around the world, these exhibitions are odes to some of the gallery's longest-lasting relationships. Over the course of their careers, these figures, with Pace's support, charted new courses in the history of art. Pace's 65th anniversary presentations are listed chronologically below:

Joel Shapiro — Tokyo, January
Louise Nevelson — New York, January; Seoul, April
Kenneth Noland — Seoul, January; Tokyo, March
Sam Gilliam — Seoul, January; Tokyo, March
Jean Dubuffet — New York, March; Berlin, May
Robert Indiana — Hong Kong, March; New York, May
Robert Irwin — Los Angeles, April
Robert Mangold — New York, May
James Turrell — Seoul, June
Claes Oldenburg — Tokyo, July
Agnes Martin — New York, November

About the Artist

Louise Nevelson, a leading sculptor of the 20th century, pioneered site-specific and installation art. She is best known for her monumental sculptures composed of discarded furniture and wooden elements found near her New York City studio. Nevelson arranged these elements into nested, box-like structures, she would then paint them in monochromatic black, white, or gold—transforming disparate elements into a unified structure. She also experimented with bronze, terracotta, and Plexiglas, eventually moving into the realm of collage, works on paper, and public art. With her compositions, Nevelson explored the relational possibilities of sculpture, summing up the objectification of the external world into a personal landscape. Although her practice is situated in lineage with Cubism and Constructivism, her sense of space and interest in the transcendence of the object reveal an affinity with Abstract Expressionism.

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