A Closer Look

Michaela Mohrmann, Associate Curatorial Director, on Mao Yan's Oval Portrait of Thomas No. 2

Painting from photographs he takes of people in his social circle, Mao Yan carefully selects the images that form the basis of his portraits. For this likeness of Thomas Rochenwald, a close friend he has repeatedly painted over the last ten years, Mao chose an awkward—even slightly unflattering—pose that focuses our gaze on the sitter’s broad, fleshy throat. With Thomas’s head tilted away from the picture plane, we as viewers fail to connect with his averted eyes, painted in a diluted blue whose pallor exacerbates their vacancy and remoteness. Instead, our eyes lock with two dark, cavernous nostrils. Their grotesque salience, reminiscent of the details in Goya’s own satirical portraiture, puncture the high seriousness of the work’s Romanticism with understated humor. Rather than offering a window into the soul of his subject, Mao stages a missed encounter between Thomas and his viewers, who remain detached outsiders—a position that ironically brings them closer to Thomas’s own status as a foreigner in China.

A similar sense of alienation has also defined Mao’s experience as a Chinese artist. During the Cultural Revolution, he was exiled from Beijing, the country’s art capital, to the peripheral outpost of Nanjing, and later willfully banished himself to inner Mongolia. Rejecting the styles of Cynical Realism and Political Pop that were dominant at the start of his career, he further disassociated himself from stereotypical notions of the Chinese artist by adopting the painting techniques of European Old Masters. Defying the demands of a market favoring overtly Chinese subject matter, he also avoided all Chinese iconography through his portraiture’s stubborn focus on European sitters. Oval Portrait of Thomas No. 2 is therefore less a portrait capturing the essence of an individual than an affirmation of the artist’s own uncompromising individuality.

Mark Beasley, Curatorial Director of Pace Live, on Lee Kun-Yong's Bodyscape 76-1-2019

A leading figure in Korean conceptual and performance art, Lee Kun-Yong created his Bodyscape series as a challenge to the physical limitations of the body. Painting from the rear of the canvas, which is scaled to the proportions of the artist’s body, Lee literally reaches over the canvas’s top edge to place the first of many wavering brushstrokes. Each of the painting’s four horizontal sections contains a series of daubed vertical stripes; black acrylic is overlaid with white, which in turn becomes a muddied gray. Once the first horizontal section is painted, the line is cut, folded, and following Lee’s “action,” re-seamed. Based on a seminal 1976 performance by the artist, the work refers to and registers the former authoritarian regime in South Korea in which freedom of movement and of action were equally restrictive. The assuredness of the brushstrokes gains momentum from section to section, and by the last panel the artist has found a clear rhythm and freedom in his mark-making.

Mark Beasley, Curatorial Director of Pace Live, on Alex Katz's Weeping Cherry 2

Alex Katz’s painting of the weeping cherry isn’t as one would imagine, there are no clumped pink blossoms or blushed coral petals drooping from weary boughs. Instead we are witness to the permanent architecture that supports such a seasonal event, the “off-season” ochre of skeletal branches. Chocolate limbs are set against a wash of mint green, anchored by a ground of applied ecru. As a painter, Katz anticipated the graphic qualities of Pop Art, employing the surface energy of expressionist gesture: a seductive coming together and unique exercise in compression that found its precursor in the Japanese woodcut prints that so inspired the artist early in his career. In Japan, rather than the celebration it has become in the US, the flowering of the cherry tree is a time of reflection and consideration of the ephemeral. InWeeping Cherry 2, the artist eschews the giddy flush of “pink youth” in favor of the grounded strength of naked form. Katz invites us to contemplate the life of a tree that for eleven months of the year stands bare, grounded, yet unconsidered.