The Monster

Curated by Robert Nava

Past
Feb 1 – Mar 22, 2025
Los Angeles

Pace is pleased to present The Monster, an exhibition curated by artist Robert Nava, at its Los Angeles gallery. On view from February 1 to March 22, 2025, this presentation will bring together paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by an intergenerational group of artists—including several LA-based artists—within and beyond the gallery’s program and will coincide with this year’s edition of Frieze Los Angeles.

Inspired in part by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this exhibition, organized by Nava in collaboration with Pace’s Chief Curator Oliver Shultz, will celebrate monstrous bodies and fabulations of monstrosity in contemporary art—not the everyday monsters of waking life, but rather the fantasy monster, the monster of childhood, the mythical beast, the shapeless creature of the unconscious. This monster is a pre-image, an inchoate nightmare, a being neither human nor animal with the power to both terrify and enamor.

The Monster will feature works by Huma Bhabha, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Nicole Eisenman, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Thomas Houseago, Rashid Johnson, Li Hei Di, Robert Longo, Tala Madani, Paul McCarthy, Ugo Rondinone, Lucas Samaras, Peter Saul, Raqib Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Paul Thek, alongside other significant figures of the 20th and 21st centuries. With a focus on modern and contemporary figuration, the show will reflect Nava’s sensibility and include work by Nava himself, as well as other contemporary and emerging painters. A special presentation of works by Thek will anchor the exhibition.

Populated by a cast of hybrid and chimaeric bodies, at once mythic and everyday, Nava’s paintings and drawings navigate the space between the raw and the refined. Often imbued with a sense of philosophical and psychological charge, his figures suggest a dark, contemplative, and existential mood despite their vibrancy, liveliness, and humor. Nava takes inspiration for his distinctive lexicon of characters and forms from a diverse range of sources, from ancient art to mythology and religion to horror films, science fiction, video games, and cartoons.

Many of the artists in The Monster have impacted Nava’s point of view. Trafficking in the language of the uncanny and the grotesque, the figures that proliferate in these works are formless monstrosities of the imagination. Horrifying as they may be, they help us understand that a monster might, in the end, be the most human being of all.

Films

Robert Nava on Bringing Monstrosity to Life

Robert Nava sheds light on the conceptual underpinnings of The Monster and speaks about the works on view, including sculptures by Paul Thek, a photograph by Cindy Sherman, and paintings by Carroll Dunham and Rashid Johnson. Neither entirely human nor animal, the monster, Nava says, "could be the thing you're scared of but want to know more about, or something normal and unassuming."

Untitled (Cosmic Skull) by Thomas Houseago

Robert Nava

Driven by his desire to “make new myths” responsive to our times, Robert Nava has created a chimerical world of metamorphic creatures, drawing inspiration from sources as disparate as prehistoric cave paintings, Egyptian art, and cartoons. Rendered through a raw, energetic mixing of spray paint, acrylics, and grease pencil, his large-scale paintings of fantastical beasts exude a playful candidness that defies the pretensions of high art and invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods.

Learn More