Pace Gallery Announces Representation of Anicka Yi

Pace is pleased to announce its representation of Anicka Yi, who explores subjects across technology, microbiology, and politics through her highly inventive artworks. Known for her rigorous research-based practice, Yi creates imaginative installations incorporating unconventional and unexpected organic and human-made materials—from animal and plant matter to mechanical, animatronic, and algorithmic elements—to investigate what she calls a “biopolitics of the senses.” Guided by a deep interest in the nuances and mysteries of embodied experience, Yi experiments with visual, sensory, and olfactory elements across painting, sculpture, and installation. She usesscientific techniques and new technologies to foreground issues of perception and human psychology in her work.

Pace will represent Yi in partnership with Gladstone Gallery, 47 Canal, and Esther Schipper. Yi will debut a new painting on Pace’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong in March and will present her first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York in 2027.

Yi’s work will also feature in the New Museum in New York’s upcoming group exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, which will inaugurate the institution’s expanded building. This presentation, opening March 21, centers on evolving definitions of what it means to be human through works by more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers.

Later this spring, on May 17, Yi will unveil her first large-scale outdoor project at Storm King Art Center in New York. This site-specific installation—for which the artist sources water and soil samples from the sculpture park’s ponds—will be a complex microbiological portrait of the genetic, bacterial, and geological makeup of the local landscape, inviting viewers to engage with concepts of geological time and evolutionary history through the lens of “prehistoric biofiction.”

Samanthe Rubell, President of Pace Gallery, says:

“Anicka is one of the most innovative artists of our time. Combining materials from the natural world with cutting-edge processes and technologies, her works are extraordinary, uncanny worlds unto themselves. Grappling with relevant political and ecological questions of the present moment, her experimental practice is part of a long lineage of artists—including Robert Irwin and James Turrell—who expanded the phenomenological possibilities of art making. We’re thrilled to welcome Anicka to the gallery and to present her new work at Art Basel Hong Kong during this very exciting year!”

Born in Seoul in 1971, Yi was raised in Southern California, and she studied at the University of California Los Angeles and Hunter College in New York. Based in New York since the 1990s, she produced her first artworks in 2008 as part of the collective Circular File. Around this time, early in her career, she began experimenting with olfactory art by making her own fragrances. As her practice evolved, she has initiated collaborations with chemists and perfumers around the world to continue investigating the emotional, cultural, and psychological powers of smell.

“I think that smell opens up an incredible, totalizing potential for art,” Yi said in an interview with The New York Times in 2021. “Smell alters our chemicals. It shapes our desires. It can also make us gravely ill. There is always going to be biological risk, social risk, when we talk about air.”

The artist presented her first major museum exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2014, and the following year she had solo presentations at The Kitchen in New York, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and the Kunsthalle Basel. She won the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize in 2016 and opened a solo show at the museum in 2017. For Anicka Yi: In Love With the World, her 2021 Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, she transformed the museum’s large post-industrial space into a new ecosystem of floating “biologized machines” powered by drones and algorithmic technologies. In 2024 and 2025, she mounted solo exhibitions at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Yi has also participated in significant group shows over the course of her career, including the Venice Biennale (2019); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017); the Okayama Art Summit and the Gwangju Biennale (2016); the Taipei Biennial (2014); and the Lyon Biennale (2013).

Her work can be found in major collections around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art,and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; the Denver Art Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art; Tate Modern in London; the Pinault Collection in Paris and Venice; the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul; and K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong.

To learn more about Anicka Yi, click here.