Presenting Our Pace Verso Fall 2022 Program

Pace Verso, the web3 hub of Pace Gallery, announces details of its third season of NFT programming. Fall 2022 projects from Pace Verso will include the first-ever NFTs by five artists and collectives from the gallery’s program: teamLab, whose interactive Matter is Void project explores ideas of ownership; Random International, the collective behind the immersive, widely exhibited installation Rain Room (2012); the celebrated sculptor Sui Jianguo; and Tara Donovan and Loie Hollowell, whose projects are realized as part of Pace Verso’s multifaceted partnership—encompassing NFT releases, exhibitions, and other in-person and digital programming— with the generative art platform Art Blocks. The forthcoming season will also include in-person presentations of NFTs at international art fairs and Pace’s global galleries in addition to AMA discussions with artists and project partners on Pace Verso’s dedicated Discord server, which has cultivated a robust following through direct engagement with web3 communities.

Marc Glimcher, President and CEO of Pace Gallery, says:
“Since we launched Pace Verso in 2021, our artists have been leading the charge into web3, bringing their wide- ranging, cross-disciplinary practices into the digital realm. Their excitement and zeal have guided the work of the Pace Verso team members, who, over the course of the past year, have supported artists in realizing a number of highly innovative and creative projects that we’ve been proud to share with our existing audience as well as the crypto community. We look forward to our forthcoming Pace Verso season, which will see five artists and collectives make their debuts in web3.”

Launched in November 2021, Pace Verso reflects the gallery’s commitment to supporting the advanced studio practices of artists within and beyond its roster. With Pace Verso, the gallery continues its long history of innovation and support of artists who have cultivated advanced studio practices engaged with boundary-pushing technologies as well as artists who have worked in traditional mediums and are expanding their practices using new digital tools.

Pace Verso’s latest projects build on the success of its first year, which saw the release of cutting-edge NFT projects by Jeff Koons, Glenn Kaino, Lucas Samaras, Zhang Huan, John Gerrard, DRIFT, and other artists. Continued programming around Koons’s ambitious Moon Phases NFT project, through which the artist will send a group of sculptures to the Moon on an Intuitive Machines lunar lander, will also figure prominently in Pace Verso’s forthcoming season.

Next year, Pace Verso will release a group of new NFTs from artist Leo Villareal’s acclaimed Cosmic Reef series that uses an infinite array of sequences to meditate on randomness, symmetry, and beauty in nature. This drop on Pace Verso will follow the digital art platform Outland’s release of new generative works by Villareal, which will be celebrated with a preview presentation within a former chapel at Stone Nest in London on October 11. To learn more about Cosmic Reef, please visit www.pacegallery.com/journal/leo-villareal-launches-first-nft-project-art-blocks.

The start of the fall program will coincide with the launch of Pace Verso’s new, Ethereum-backed sales platform built by Mojito. Offering custodial wallets and payments via crypto, credit cards, or wire transfer, this platform update will serve Pace Verso’s efforts to make purchasing NFTs as easy as possible. Varied customization tools will also support Pace Verso’s mission to support a wide range of artists’ practices in the web3 space.

Pace Verso’s fall 2022 program—including release and display dates—is detailed below.

Release date: Oct 10, 2022
On view: Oct 12 – 16, 2022 at Frieze London
Pace Verso Discord AMA: Oct 7, 2022
Art Blocks Discord AMA: Oct 10, 2022

Tara Donovan’s forthcoming NFT project, titled QWERTY, meditates on the ways that type can function as a building block for creating patterns. Each NFT in this series depicts repeating, mesmeric arrangements of a single letter or symbol represented on computer keyboards. Letters and symbols are rendered in varying degrees of legibility in layered compositions, which are the result of meticulous pattern development, organization, and refinement based on algorithmic processes. QWERTY is realized as part of Pace Verso’s ongoing, multifaceted partnership with the leading generative art platform Art Blocks.

Variations in column and row density, character quantity, and wave frequencies and amplitudes, among other traits, can be experienced in these NFTs. Donovan’s QWERTY patterns reflect her interest in surface depth and perspectival mutability. The QWERTY NFTs—which originate from the artist’s eponymous book published in 2018— are deeply engaged with her studio practice, in particular her screen drawings and gridded relief prints.

Release date: Oct 19, 2022
On view: Oct 20 – 23, 2022 at Paris+ par Art Basel
Pre-release activation: Oct 12, 2022

Matter is Void, the first-ever NFT project by the interdisciplinary art collective teamLab, comprises seven unique NFTs bearing the words “Matter is Void,” a reference to the Japanese-Buddhist expression Shikisoku Zekuu, which centers on the meanings of emptiness. To explore ideas of authorship and ownership, teamLab has adopted a radical format for Matter is Void that enables the NFT purchasers to change the words displayed in the work. The Matter is Void artwork will also be available for individuals around the world to download, own, and display at any time. The downloaded works will reflect purchasing collectors’ real-time modifications to the words displayed in the NFTs. While the NFT provides collectors with the right to change the text, all works downloaded by NFT purchasers as well as individuals who do not own the NFTs are equally authentic.

Release date: Oct 25, 2022

Life in Our Minds, an NFT project by the experimental art collective Random International and multidisciplinary digital artist Danil Krivoruchko, comprises two parts: an animated NFT collection and a related interactive video sculpture, titled Mother Flock and made up of the individual NFTs, that will be unveiled later this year. Life in Our Minds is realized by Pace Verso and Snark.art’s OG.Art NFT platform.

Upon minting, each Life in Our Minds NFT features a small group of Boids, 3D bird-like origami objects. The visual traits of any given Life in Our Minds NFT are initially generated and evolve according to the content of its owner’s wallet, among other factors. The longer a Life in Our Minds NFT remains in a single collector’s wallet, the rarer and more elaborate its formal characteristics become: the number of Boids may increase, and their formations and decorative patterns may change. These interactive, 3D video NFTs are distinguished by their continuous development, which is achieved through the highly complex and inventive technological processes of the Life in Our Minds collection.

Loie Hollowell’s first-ever NFT project is based on her Split Orb sculptural paintings, a series of works she began creating following the birth of her second child. In the series, two bifurcated orbs are situated one on top of the other, with the top orb representing the artist’s brain and the lower orb signifying her pregnant belly and cervix. Hollowell’s colorful, textural Split Orb works are a meditation on the visceral experience of vaginal birth.

In her forthcoming NFTs, Hollowell brings her Split Orb series to the digital realm. The colors of these images are drawn from a wide spectrum, from grayscale to a neon palette. The NFTs feature ten set degrees of openings at the orbs' centers, representing each of the ten centimeters of cervix dilation required to begin the second “pushing” stage of labor. With variations of diverse hues and openings, the orbs reflect, on a conceptual level, the artist’s shifting state of mind and body during childbirth, with each of the colors representing her ranging emotional states. Hollowell will donate a portion of proceeds from the project’s sales to a nonprofit reproductive rights organization in the US. This project is realized as part of Pace Verso’s multifaceted partnership with the leading generative art platform Art Blocks.

Release date: Early 2023
On view: Nov 10 – 13, 2022 at West Bund Art & Design

Sculptor Sui Jianguo—who is known for his use of diverse media and wide-ranging forms in works that examine the modern history of China—has created an NFT series derived from his highly tactile Traces series. His first NFT will feature an image of an imaginary celestial body, Nibiru, as it travels through the solar system and is influenced by the invisible gravitational pulls of various planets.

Viewers of the NFT can move and tilt their cell phones—and zoom in and out of the meteoroid’s surface—to experience the Yin-Yang topology of inner and outer space. Tilting the orientation of the cell phone also enables viewers to orient their own bodies to Earth’s magnetic field, imbuing the work with a game-like, interactive ethos.

To learn more about Pace Verso, please visit www.pacegallery.com/pace-verso.