Nina Katchadourian Joins Pace

We are pleased to announce representation of Nina Katchadourian, an interdisciplinary artist whose conceptual practice spans video, performance, sound, sculpture, and photography, as well as public projects.

Raised in California and currently based in Brooklyn and Berlin, Katchadourian has embraced an optimistic search for the artistic potential in the mundane, resulting in works that both subvert and activate our usual sense of life and its surroundings.

“We are thrilled to have Nina as part of the Pace family. Over the course of her esteemed career, Nina has created objects and moments that upend the expectations of our collective consciousness. With the close support and collaboration of her longtime San Francisco dealer, Catharine Clark, we look forward to sharing Nina’s unique vision with a broader audience.”—Marc Glimcher, CEO and President of Pace Gallery

Katchadourian's works are connected across her diverse practice through her singular and acute sense of observation, curiosity, resourcefulness, and use of humor. In 2010, Katchadourian started her widely recognized and ongoing “Seat Assignment” project, made entirely while in-flight and using only her cellphone and the materials at hand. The series “Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style” (2011) was executed in the airplane bathroom using materials like paper towels and tissue-paper seat covers to effect the look of 15th-century Flemish paintings. Other works utilize more common items such as in-flight magazines, snack foods, and detritus left by other passengers as raw material for her ingenious improvisations. In 2015, Katchadourian's six-channel video Accent Elimination (2005) was included in the Venice Biennale as part of the Armenian Pavilion, which was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The work, presented as a series of talking heads in conversational sync, was inspired by an attempt to acquire the complicated, hybrid accents of her foreign-born parents. Some of her earlier notable bodies of work includes “Sorted Books” (1993– ongoing), interventions in special and private book collections that result in photographic works and installations of rearranged books. Stacked or aligned, the books’ titles form short phrases and sentences when read sequentially, and function as a portrait of the book collection as a whole, such as “Kansas Cut-Up,” pulled from the library of William S. Burroughs.

Throughout her expansive career, Katchadourian has been the subject of a number of solo museum exhibitions. In 2006, she had her first museum survey at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. More recently, in 2017, a traveling retrospective of her work titled Curiouser opened at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin with an accompanying monograph, marking her largest exhibition to date. The exhibition then traveled to the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in September 2017, and the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, in March 2018. She has also been commissioned by major institutions to develop multidisciplinary works that engage with their immediate surroundings, including The Recarcassing Ceremony, a film commissioned by Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016, and Floater Theater, a permanent installation produced for the Exploratorium in San Francisco in October 2016. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art, New York presented Katchadourian's audio tour on the subject of dust titled Dust Gathering, as part of the museum’s program "Artists Experiment,” which invites contemporary artists from around the world to create pieces reflecting upon or utilizing the museum’s resources. Past public commissions in New York have included pieces for the Public Art Fund and Creative Time.

In addition to these monographic exhibitions and commissions, Katchadourian’s work is in public and private collections including the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; the Margulies Collection, Miami; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Katchadourian has received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Nancy Graves Foundation, and Grönqvistska Stiftelsen. Her work has been widely published internationally, including a monograph, Sorted Books, published by Chronicle Books in 2013. Katchadourian is also an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Katchadourian is currently working on new commissions for Skissernas Museum in Lund, Sweden, and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA. An exhibition scheduled for February 2023 at the Morgan Library & Museum will feature Katchadourian’s selection of works from the permanent collection shown alongside works of her own.

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