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Art Fairs

Frieze New York

Online

May 5 – May 15, 2020

Perspectives presents leading artists from Pace Gallery’s global contemporary program who have pushed the boundaries of their chosen media to make new work for the current moment.

Nigel Cooke
Mary Corse
Nathalie Du Pasquier
Torkwase Dyson
Loie Hollowell
Nina Katchadourian

Kohei Nawa
Trevor Paglen
Adam Pendleton
Song Dong
Leo Villareal
Brent Wadden

Nigel Cooke, Oceans, 2020, oil and acrylic on linen, 88-9/16" × 64-9/16" (224.9 cm × 164 cm)

Nigel Cooke

Nigel Cooke's recent paintings, characterized by sweeping gestural brushstrokes, bridge abstraction and representation within a vibrant scope of color. Marking a new approach to figuration for the artist, these works reference actions, places, and people, existing as matrices in which Cooke’s free and open process meets wider themes of metaphor, spirit, nature, representation, and the living material quality of paint. Painted on raw canvas, these works involve several layers and washes, hinting at atmospheric emanations or presences. Not dependent on a fixed viewpoint but instead drifting between states, the compositions unfix the viewer’s traditional understanding of figurative representation, allowing for the possibility of transformation.

Mary Corse, Untitled (White Inner Band), 2020, glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas, 36" × 36" (91.4 cm × 91.4 cm)

Mary Corse

Throughout the 1960s, Mary Corse experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes. In 1968, she discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on highways. Combining these tiny refractive beads with acrylic paint, she creates paintings that appear to radiate light from within and produce shifts in appearance contingent on their surroundings and the viewer’s position. This discovery has led to decades of experimentation wherein Corse’s art emphasizes the abstract nature of human perception, extending beyond the visual to include subtleties of feeling and awareness.

Nathalie Du Pasquier, FLIPPER, 2019, oil on canvas, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm)

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Nathalie Du Pasquier, a founding member of the Milan-based postmodern design group Memphis, is a painter whose works incorporate elements of design and explore the relationships between objects and the spaces they inhabit. With her recent work, Du Pasquier’s organization of form merges the representational with the non-representational, the tangible with the intangible, and reality with imagination.

Nathalie Du Pasquier, Untitled, 2019, oil on canvas, 19-11/16" × 19-11/16" (50 cm × 50 cm)
Nathalie Du Pasquier, Untitled, 2019, oil on canvas, 19-11/16" × 19-11/16" (50 cm × 50 cm)
Torkwase Dyson, Massing, Whispers of Love are Built in the Water Deep (Water Futures and Architecture Series), 2020, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 80" × 96" (203.2 cm × 243.8 cm)

Torkwase Dyson

Working in painting, sculpture, drawing, and performance, Torkwase Dyson’s compositions address the continuity of movement, climate change, infrastructure, and architecture. For Dyson, the relationship between these subjects produces abstractions that explore black spatial liberation strategies and environmental politics.

The surfaces of Dyson’s paintings are layered in black and blue washes with fine diagrammatic white lines that abstract spatial systems and narrate the prismatic color of oceans and deep waters. The repetition of the box, the curve, the triangle, and the trapezoid continues to inform Dyson’s exploration of what she has called “black compositional thought.” Transforming these geometric typologies in dialogue with the history of black resistance, Dyson’s project maps the relationship between the body, systems infrastructure, and environmental precarity in the past, present, and future. With varied and accumulated surfaces, the paintings suggest a gravitational force echoed in the dimensionality and depth of geometric planes foregrounded by atmospheric color fields.

Torkwase Dyson, Proximities, Whispers of Love are Built in the Water Deep (Water Futures and Architecture Series), 2020, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 80" × 96" × 2" (203.2 cm × 243.8 cm × 5.1 cm)

As the artist describes, “When people look at the work they think about a kind of black, but most are actually red, black, and green. The shade is from a practice I have come to understand by diving in so many parts of the oceans around the world and understanding how light changes underwater, refraction happens, shade happens, and tint happens. Abstraction can create a distance that allows you to comprehend a systemic logic—how it has been controlled and designed outside your input. To be a part of an environment of global warming that has nothing to do with my decisions in terms of the macro is alarming. My interest is in working in these established realms of looking: How do I get closer to that through this form which I’m using, abstraction?”

Nina Katchadourian discusses her "Sorted Books" project.

Nina Katchadourian

For her Sorted Books series (ongoing since 1993), Nina Katchadourian engages with library collections, both private and public, selecting volumes and creating groupings where titles can be read as a whole. The resulting works point to through-lines in collections, making incisive and thought-provoking inferences about each library's particular focus, omissions, or idiosyncrasies. Often, these works create a "portrait" of a concept, subject, or figure. This group of works, including titles such as An Independent Woman, Freud in a Week, and The Narcissist Test, were made from the collection of Wood Street Library, located in the Walthamstowe neighborhood in London. The library was slated for closure and demolition, its 1950s-era building deemed too expensive to renovate, and Katchadourian’s project honors the library during its last months on Wood Street, by celebrating its diverse collection.

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Installation view, Nina Katchadourian, "Sorted Books" project, 1993 – Ongoing
Nina Katchadourian, The Narcissist Test from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993-ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, Giving Effective Feedback from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993- ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, Remembering Slavery from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993-ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, Afterlives of the Rich and Famous from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993-ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" × 1-1/2" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm × 3.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, Freud in a Week from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993- ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, Elizabeth the Queen from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993-ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, An Independent Woman from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993- ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, I Am Death from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993- ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" × 1-1/2" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm × 3.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, Jesus Christ Superstar from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993-ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, USA from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993-ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm), framed
Nina Katchadourian, The Mesmerist from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993- ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" × 1-1/2" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm × 3.8 cm), Framed
Nina Katchadourian, You from the series Wood Street Library, 2019 ("Sorted Books" project, 1993-ongoing), 2019, C-print, 12-1/2" × 19" (31.8 cm × 48.3 cm), print 13-1/2" × 20" (34.3 cm × 50.8 cm), framed
Loie Hollowell, Expanding Figure, 2019, oil paint, acrylic medium, and high density foam on linen over panel, 72" × 54" × 3" (182.9 cm × 137.2 cm × 7.6 cm)

Loie Hollowell

Loie Hollowell transcribes the human figure in a language of abstraction, creating paintings that evoke landscapes and sacred iconography. Subject matter in Hollowell’s work often emerges through phenomenological encounter rather than narrative content, tapping the depth of the artist’s embodied experience. Expanding Figure continues her exploration of pregnancy, drawing upon the evolution of her own body through the birth of her second child. Incorporating added volume to painting through the use of high-density foam, Hollowell creates surfaces that engage with issues of perception, blurring the line between the illusory and the real. As the artist explains, "This painting is a visualization of the birth process. Painting it has helped me meditate on the journey of home birth that I'm about to experience. Eight months ago I decided to have a home birth with my second child. At first, I was very nervous about this decision, but now I couldn't be more thankful for my home birth team. "

Kohei Nawa

Kohei Nawa investigates nature and artificiality through the use of synthetic compounds such as polyurethane, translucent beads, ink, paint, glue, and silicone, prompting an awareness of our mediated environment. His PixCell works are made by covering the surface of a found object with transparent spheres, transforming each into a “husk of light.” The artist acquires the objects on the internet, later covering it in a layer of variously sized cells, recalling the manner in which it was originally viewed on a computer screen as a group of pixels. The object’s surface is fragmented with countless reflections, an effect that produces magnification and distortion as multiple details are viewed simultaneously.

Kohei Nawa, PixCell-Telephone#3, 2020, mixed media, 7-7/16" × 14-9/16" × 14-9/16" (18.9 cm × 37 cm × 37 cm)
Kohei Nawa, PixCell-Crow#4, 2020, mixed media, 14-3/4" × 14-3/16" × 16-3/8" (37.5 cm × 36 cm × 41.6 cm)
Trevor Paglen, CLOUD #865 Hough Circle Transform, 2019, dye sublimation print, 60" × 48" (152.4 cm × 121.9 cm)

Trevor Paglen

Continuing his exploration of artificial intelligence and its impact on perception, Trevor Paglen’s Cloud works present atmospheric conditions overlaid with lines that make visible the “reading” of forms by AI algorithmic programs. These technological processes of sight represent systems of deconstruction, wherein a photograph is comprehended by a computer algorithm by “reading” a series of simplified essential shapes. Paglen’s Cloud works reference early landscape photography, and by pointing to histories of image-making, allow for contemporary understandings of the genre within the current era of surveillance.

Trevor Paglen, CLOUD #603 Watershed, 2019, dye sublimation print, 48" × 60" (121.9 cm × 152.4 cm)
Trevor Paglen, CLOUD #135 Hough Lines, 2019, dye sublimation print, 48" × 65" (121.9 cm × 165.1 cm)
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (OKOKOKOKOKOKOKOK), 2019-2020, silkscreen ink on mylar, 38" × 29" (96.5 cm × 73.7 cm), 9 sheets, each 40-3/8" × 31-3/8" (102.6 cm × 79.7 cm), 9 artist's frames, each

Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton reconfigures historical images and texts in an exploration of cultural perspectives, from social resistance movements to Dada, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. He draws from articulations of blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde through a signature framework he has termed Black Dada. Pendleton’s screen-print paintings engage with a visual and conceptual overlapping of language—from his own writing and that of found sources—conceptual art, and activism, creating a dialogue of disruption in legibility or semiotic clarity.

Song Dong, Usefulness of Uselessness - Varied Window No. 14, 2018, old wooden windows, mirror, mirror panel, glass, 57-11/16" × 51-3/4" (146.5 cm × 131.4 cm)

Song Dong

Song Dong’s conceptual practice emerged from the avant-garde and experimental arts community in China, engaging with various forms of media including installation, performance, video, painting, and sculpture. His Usefulness of Uselessness series reflects the artist's interest in working with humble, everyday materials. Discarded furniture and parts of demolished courtyard homes from Old Beijing can all be easily identified in this recent body of work. Each window has been enhanced by mirror or glass, while the recycled nature of the work remains evident in the flaking paint and rusting latches. These collaged remnants reflect themes of memory, collective history, impermanence – all enduring concerns throughout the artist’s oeuvre.

Song Dong, Doing Nothing Doing Debris 007, 2014, old window, mirror, 28-3/8" × 66-15/16" × 19-11/16" (72.1 cm × 170 cm × 50 cm)

Leo Villareal

Leo Villareal’s Instance series, comprised of thirty-three singularly unique works—each comprised of 36,864 LEDs—become malleable and adaptable synchronies wherein the possibility of order, however fleeting and subtle, appears visually across the units before gradually dissipating into a chaotic state. Villareal uses custom software to program each work to emit tailored and randomized light sequences. Working with code, Villareal focuses attention on the actual binary units, rooting them in the art historical context of printmaking as well as within the history of practice engaged with material, mass imagery, mechanical reproduction, and the conceptual motivations that underpin them. Visually, the swiftly moving particles inspire contemplation and suggest the sublime vastness of the universe, the enigmatic world of subatomic particles, and the fundamental properties of living systems.

Leo Villareal, Optical Machine I, 2019

Leo Villareal discusses Optical Machine.

Leo Villareal, Optical Machine I, 2019, LEDs, custom software, electrical hardware, steel, 4' 9-3/8" × 9' 6-1/8" × 3" (145.7 cm × 289.9 cm × 7.6 cm)
Brent Wadden, Untitled, 2019, hand woven fibers, wool, cotton and acrylic on canvas, 37" × 36" (94 cm × 91.4 cm)

Brent Wadden

Through warp and weft, Brent Wadden’s recent weavings embrace the variations that emerge through a process of repetition, revealing subtle disruptions in the accumulation of line, color, and form. The geometric patterns of his compositions evoke Bauhaus sensibilities, the quilts of Gee’s Bend, and Agnes Martin’s gridded paintings. His recent work is characterized by vibrant, vertical compositions that are bisected by diagonals formed through transitions between different colors of yarn. The contrasting effects of the intersections of color also recall the optical studies of Josef Albers.

Brent Wadden, Untitled, 2019, hand woven fibers, wool, cotton and acrylic on canvas, 37" × 35" (94 cm × 88.9 cm)
Brent Wadden, Untitled, 2019, handwoven fibers, wool, cotton and acrylic on canvas, 33-7/8" × 29-15/16" (86 cm × 76 cm)
To inquire about any of the artists or works featured in this exhibition, please email inquiries@pacegallery.com.
  • Past, Frieze New York, Online, May 5, 2020