Louise Nevelson

Shadow Dance

Past
Jan 17 – Mar 1, 2025
New York

Celebrating its 62-year history with Louise Nevelson, Pace is pleased to present Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance, a major exhibition of Nevelson’s late works, curated by gallery founder Arne Glimcher, at its 540 West 25th Street location in New York.

On view from January 17 to March 1, 2025, this show will place Nevelson’s iconic monochromatic sculptures in black and white in dialogue with her collages—including several rarely seen and never previously exhibited masterworks—made in the 1970s and 1980s.

Like Mondrian’s, Nevelson’s compositions are based on a strict adherence to vertical and horizontal regularity. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was a significant development: Nevelson incorporated the diagonal into her vocabulary. A new, angular energy surfaced in many of the works she produced during this period, breaking the rules by which she traditionally composed her work.

These late works shed new light on her evolving aesthetic, bringing into focus a series of remarkably productive years of her practice in which she experimented with a new vocabulary of robust, muscular, and often minimal forms while staying true to her lifelong investigations of materiality, shape, and shadow.

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 explored the myriad possibilities of collage—a technique she transposed into sculpture by means of compartmentalized elements and forms liberated from everyday meaning. Nevelson’s use of the collage aesthetic was formalist. Her art of scavenging and her affinity for the materiality of wood are linked to her personal life and her remarkable story.

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 New York 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, opening to the public this fall. In April, 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 at Pace's Seoul gallery.

This past year, Nevelson was honored in memoriam at the Art Students League’s annual gala in New York—the artist was an alumna of the institution—and 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. Early in their relationship, Nevelson took the young Glimcher under her wing, introducing him to all of the most important Abstract Expressionist artists and bringing him into the fold of the New York art world. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, Glimcher helped Nevelson achieve a new level of international recognition, supporting her in the production of numerous large-scale public commissions around the United States and the world. Opening at the beginning of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, this forthcoming Nevelson exhibition reflects the artist’s enduring and deeply personal relationship with Glimcher, and her indelible place in the gallery's history and its ethos today.

Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance will showcase two of Nevelson’s rare white-painted wood sculptures—Study for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and the never-before-exhibited Dawn’s Light, both created circa 1975—among her signature black-painted wood sculptures, including the large-scale freestanding composition Cascade- Perpendiculars XXX (1980–1982). Nevelson specifically spoke about the relationship of her black and white works to the perceptual thresholds of dawn and dusk, the liminal, transitional, and indiscernible moments between day and night. Harkening back to her famed large-scale, all-white sculptural installation Dawn’s Wedding Feast (1959)— which was presented at the Museum of Modern Art as a single installation before being split into separate parts— Dawn’s Light speaks to the ways that Nevelson’s later expressions were guided by the project of transformation and transfiguration that energized her practice for more than four decades.

The gallery’s presentation will also feature Artillery Landscape (ca.1985), a single sculpture consisting of a group of individual floor-based elements, which was exhibited for the first time as part of Louise Nevelson. Persistence in Venice in 2022. Never before seen in the United States, this sculptural installation comprises reclaimed wooden artillery boxes found, reconstructed, and painted black by Nevelson in the last few years of her life. The hinged box- like elements of Artillery Landscape refer back to Nevelson’s psychologically charged Dream House series of the early 1970s, yet the title of the work derives from the origin of the boxes themselves, scavenged and repurposed artillery containers for artillery. Of her interest in reclaimed materials, she once said, “I wanted to show that wood picked up on the street can turn to gold.”

Highlights in the exhibition include three wall-mounted works from the Mirror Shadows series of magisterial wall reliefs, one of the last bodies of work that Nevelson produced and among her most innovative. Alongside these important late sculptures, a selection of Nevelson’s collages attest to her intensely personal and private mode of expression, which she kept mostly secret during her lifetime. In the economy of Nevelson’s studio, the collage works emerged simultaneously with her monochromatic sculptures as extensions of the same creative gesture. Providing a new avenue for explorations of color, light, shadow, reflection, and line, these works incorporate combinations of metallic foil, cardboard, sandpaper, tape, wood, spray paint, printed paper, and newspaper. Tearing and re- combining traces of the past to produce a raw, unfiltered beauty, Nevelson developed an aesthetic of fragmentation and reassembly in her collages that animated the spirit of all her work.

No matter how individual we humans are, we are a composite of everything we are aware of. We are a mirror of our times.

Louise Nevelson

FILMS

Arne Glimcher on Louise Nevelson's Experimental Late Works

In this new film, Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher speaks about his decades-long friendship with Louise Nevelson and discusses her impact on the history of art. Glimcher also sheds light on the nuances of Nevelson's late works, in which she explored a new vocabulary of robust, muscular, and often minimal forms. "In the late work, there's that sense of ebullient freedom, ravishing beauty," Glimcher says, adding that her life and career ended "in a rapturous glory of experimentation."

Study for the Chapel of the Good Sheperd by Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson Remembered: Sculpture and Collages

Pace Publishing

Publishing Louise Nevelson

Since our first exhibition of Louise Nevelson’s work in 1961, we’ve mounted more than 30 presentations dedicated to the artist, who holds an indelible place in Pace’s history and its ethos today. In celebration of our current exhibition in New York, which is being presented during the gallery’s 65th anniversary year, we've curated a selection of publications on the artist.

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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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Exhibition Details

Louise Nevelson
Shadow Dance
Jan 17 – Mar 1, 2025

Gallery

540 West 25th Street
New York

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Louise Nevelson

Shadow Dance

FILMS

Arne Glimcher on Louise Nevelson's Experimental Late Works

Featured Works

Pace Publishing

Publishing Louise Nevelson

About the Artist

Exhibition Details

Gallery

Press

Connect

Journal

Publishing Louise Nevelson

Arne Glimcher on Louise Nevelson's Experimental Late Works

Particular Passions: Louise Nevelson

The Louise Nevelson Foundation Announces Official Collateral Event of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia