Frieze New York

Past
May 5 – May 9, 2021
New York

We are pleased to bring together a selection of works by 25 leading artists working across a range of media, offering a snapshot into our expansive global program.

Art Fair Details

Frieze New York
May 5 – 9, 2021

Online Preview

May 4, 2021

Above: Jeff Koons, Sling Hook, 2007-2009, polychromed aluminum and coated steel chain, 77-1/2" × 37-3/8" × 39-3/8" (196.9 cm × 94.9 cm × 100 cm) plus chain at variable length, Edition of 3 + 1 AP © Jeff Koons

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The Shed
Booth B11
545 West 30th Street
New York

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Yto Barrada

Yto Barrada’s work is intrinsically imbued with politics, often subtly suggested in symbolic visuals and instilled with a poetic sensibility rather than obvious directives and political positions. The artist’s new series of large-scale textile works continues her exploration into dyeing processes using natural pigments, and alludes to Frank Stella’s Moroccan paintings—begun in 1964 and completed the following year. Each of the 12 paintings in Stella’s series are titled after a city in Morocco. The geometry and brilliance of the fluorescent alkyd paints mimics the colorful tile patterns found during his travels there beginning in the 1960s. Citing his paintings in Barrada’s titles, these hand-sewn textile works similarly present luminous tones in alternating diagonal bands of color. Barrada’s textile works are equally inspired by the painters Mohamed Chebaa, Farid Belkahia, and Mohamed Melehi of the Casablanca Art School in the 1960s. After Morocco gained independence in 1956, these artists pioneered a style of North African modernism that belied traditions of French colonialist history, approaching abstraction through integrating materials and motifs of their local heritage and visual culture. For the present series, Barrada expands Stella’s list of Moroccan cities, adding her hometown of Tangier in compositions using indigo, cochineal, and madder.

Lynda Benglis

Over her seven decades of artmaking, Lynda Benglis has been celebrated for her unorthodox choices of media. Using materials ranging from beeswax and latex to gold-leaf and porcelain, Benglis has long been a pioneer in pushing the boundaries of sculpture with a radically exuberant artistic output that deﬁes convention. Back Bone, made in 2017, is part of a series of colorful sculptures made from cast sparkles on handmade paper and chicken wire that Benglis began exploring in 2013. Benglis ﬁrst employed chicken wire in the 1970s with polyurethane and plaster pieces, which she would later combine with paper in the 1980s in her bowtie sculptures. Bending the chicken wire into shape is a highly involved, physical process, and even something of a dance, as two people—four hands—are required to manipulate the material. Constructed from handmade paper stretched over a partially exposed wire structure, Back Bone has a lumpen, glittery surface composed of tracts of yellow, orange, purple, turquoise, and silvery blue. By pairing an open, organic form with colorful, sparkling embellishments, Benglis presents a sculpture that is celebratory and joyful, like the kites and ﬂoats the artist loved as a child growing up in Louisiana.

Mary Corse

Over the last ﬁve decades, Mary Corse has investigated perception, properties of light, and ideas of abstraction. Her pioneering approach to painting explores the medium’s capacity to utilize and refract light through subtly gestural and precisely geometric works. For the artist, the essence of painting addresses underlying structures of visual experience and their presence within space and time. Corse often emphasizes that her paintings are “not on the wall,” but instead suspended in a visual relationship between viewer and canvas.

Corse has pursued an interest in perception since the late 1960s when she began incorporating glass microspheres—an industrial material used to enhance pavement markings—into the surfaces of her paintings. This element, present in Untitled (White Narrow Inner Band with White Sides) (2020), reﬂects and refracts light depending on the viewer’s position relative to the optically rich surface.

Torkwase Dyson

Torkwase Dyson’s multidisciplinary approach to artmaking interrogates historical and existing infrastructure and architecture, particularly how Black and brown bodies compose, perceive, and negotiate space. Examining ideas of distance and scale and the history and future of black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with how space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by Black and brown bodies. Black Compositional Thought is integral to understanding Dyson’s practice and functions as a mode of awareness that contends with the formal applications of mark-making and constructions of space to examine the legacy of environmental justice and Black spatial practices.

Liberation Scaled #2 (Bird and Lava) (2020) is part of Dyson’s ongoing project, Bird and Lava, which is a multifaceted expression of a question: “If blackness is already an architectonic developed out of liquidity (ocean), can the work embody this phenomenon and offer sensation (sensoria) at the register of liberation?” Interested in the phenomenological presence of geometric forms, painting, and dimensionality, the artist’s hand is present throughout the work, in the layers of wax and ink on paper, and the compositions that gesture to horizon lines and ocean depths. In particular, this wall-sized abstract graphite work offers a surface that appears to shift and move under light and with movement, like waves contained within geometry.

Elmgreen & Dragset

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have collaborated as the artistic duo Elmgreen & Dragset since 1995. Their practice has developed various modes of making, spanning sculpture, architecture, performance, and installation, to explore the politics of institutions and draw attention towards how art is presented and perceived. Their work radically re-contextualizes objects and alters traditional modes of representation. Often playful and subversive, their work pursues complex questions and themes relating to identity, sexuality, and mortality, as well as the use of public space.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s Dirty Socks (2021) subverts traditional notions of objectification and desire. The visual appearance of this sculpture responds to Peter Hujar’s black and white photograph, Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs) (1976). The position of the crossed legs of the sculpture is drawn directly from the subject in this iconic work. Just as Hujar powerfully captured queer life in New York City, the queer experience also plays a profound role in Elmgreen & Dragset’s work.

Sam Gilliam

Known for his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, Sam Gilliam is considered one of the great innovators in post-war American painting. Gilliam emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of the Washington Color School. Since completing his art education in the early 1960s, Gilliam has been creating richly colored abstract compositions using watercolors on Japanese washi paper. The techniques that Gilliam has explored in watercolor—staining, folding, and otherwise distressing the surface of the paper—have exerted a powerful effect on his artistic practice as a whole. As Gilliam’s practice matured, his watercolors began to play a powerful role in shaping his own approach to the canvas, developing a new sense of freedom and an embrace of abstraction.

Gilliam’s most recent watercolors expand on his practice, making color palpable, a physical, textural presence that seems to belong more to our world than to the surface of the painting. Color and support are inseparable: the paper becomes the color, rather than a vessel for it. Like his draped canvases, the creases and folds of the fabric evoke a sense of depth which is echoed in the composition of each watercolor painting. In Untitled (2020), vertical washes of color on each ﬂattened surface create the illusion of folds or pleats within rich and rhythmic planes of light and dark that bleed and overlap. Like much of Gilliam’s work, both chance and choice play an important role, echoing the artist’s love of jazz, with its improvisatory ethos and spontaneity.

Loie Hollowell

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons’ Popeye series, begun in 2002, incorporates some of the artist’s recurrent signature ideas and motifs, including surreal juxtapositions of everyday objects, cartoon and kitsch imagery, art-historical references, and children’s toys. Having used inflatables in his work since the late 1970s, the sculptures featured in this series demonstrate Koons’ continued interest in cast metal readymades.

In Sling Hook (2007–2009), an example from the Popeye series, two inflatable lobster and dolphin pool toys—both meticulously rendered from aluminum and steel—are suspended from glossy red chains attached to separate hooks. At once hard and soft, familiar and uncanny, these objects defy reason and material use. Here, Koons imbues a postmodern nostalgia to mass-produced pool toys with incredible deft energy.

Maya Lin

Maya Lin’s long-established environmental activism and interest in geology, topography, and cartography have informed her practice ever since the artist’s earliest site-speciﬁc sculptures and experiments with earthworks. This site-speciﬁcity, wherein Lin’s artworks respond to their site, space, and surrounding architecture allows for a meditative and critical consideration of our environment and the natural world. Lin’s practice incorporates not only traditional approaches to design, architecture, and artmaking but also comprises scientiﬁc methods such as satellite technology and cartographic techniques.

The Traces Left Behind (From the Great Bear Lake to the Great Lakes) (2019) is an archetypal example of the practical implementation of Lin’s comprehensive environmental, historical, and ecological research, as well as her preferential use of recycled materials. Originally exhibited as part of the artist’s 2019 solo exhibition at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan, this expansive relief cast from recycled silver is a continuation of Lin’s decades-long investigation into bodies of water and their meaning as a ﬁnite resource. For The Traces Left Behind, Lin raises awareness of the Great Lakes of North America and their geographical and geological histories by mapping the spread of bodies of water—stretching from the Arctic to the Great Lakes—that were once created due to the melting of the Laurentide Ice Shelf that at one time covered much of North America. As Lin has stated about this work, “A lot of my work has been about mapping the natural world and revealing aspects of the environment that you may not be aware of…[The Traces Left Behind] takes a very recognizable mapping of the Great Lakes but adds the series of large lakes formed during the last ice age—creating a constellation-like ﬂow of water that drifts along an invisible boundary line where the glaciers carved out these bodies of water when they retreated.”

Maya Lin’s latest public commission, the installation Ghost Forest at Madison Square Park, New York, is currently on view until November 14, 2021.

Agnes Martin

Beatriz Milhazes

Beatriz Milhazes juxtaposes South American imagery with European modernist inﬂuences within a practice consisting of painting, collage, printmaking, textiles, and architectural installations. A pioneering ﬁgure of the Brazilian Geração 80 movement in the 1980s, Milhazes embraced the group’s appreciation of aesthetic value and promotion of a return to painting following the proliferation of conceptual artworks during the previous decade. The artist’s recognizable approach to abstraction, described by Milhazes as “chromatic free geometry,” combines decorative arabesque forms, repeated stylized motifs, and a ﬂamboyant celebration of color. Many of these shapes and hues derive from the botanical gardens, Tijuca forest, and oceanfront that neighbor the artist’s studio and reﬂect Milhazes’s innate interest in ﬂora and fauna of her native Brazil.

Here, Milhazes employs her patented mono-transfer painting method, a unique form of monoprinting she has developed since 1989. Milhazes paints directly onto ﬁrm plastic sheeting before imprinting imagery onto canvas, a technique that, when repeated, creates multilayered yet smooth-surfaced paintings. The innovative process does, however, produce and expose occasional unintentional erratum or involuntary variations, an idiosyncrasy welcomed by Milhazes. Uva Passa, which translates as “raisin,” presents many of Milhazes favored motifs—stars, spirals, ﬂowers, and hearts—in a kaleidoscopic carnival of color and form. Inspired by the aforementioned Brazilian wildlife and the country’s rich cultural history of ceramics, couture, and jewelry, Milhazes acknowledges these conventional crafts through her use of satisfying patterns and sumptuous ornamentation.

Robert Nava

Driven by his desire to “make new myths” responsive to our times, Robert Nava has created a chimerical world of metamorphic creatures, drawing inspiration from sources as disparate as prehistoric cave paintings, Egyptian art, and cartoons. Rendered through a raw, energetic mixing of acrylic, crayon, and grease pencil, his works on paper of fantastical beasts exude a playful candor, which belies the pretensions of high art and invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods.

To develop his uncompromisingly personal style, Nava first dispensed with the rules and conventional attitudes that he had learned while obtaining his MFA at Yale University—a perspective that aligns him with the irreverent “bad” painting first theorized in 1978 by the New Museum’s founding curator Marcia Tucker. Nonetheless, Nava’s hybrid monsters, which range from the dragon-like to the angelic, are thought-out composites that the artist continuously reworks in his sketchbooks. Drawing, a daily investigatory discipline for Nava, constitutes the bedrock of his practice.

Kohei Nawa

Kohei Nawa is a multidisciplinary artist whose diverse practice explores the perception of virtual and physical space and examines the relationship between nature and artiﬁciality and between the individual and the whole, illustrating how parts aggregating together like cells create complex and dynamic structures.

Direction #120 (2014) is a monochromatic painting that probes gravity and its effects on both the individual and the whole. Rendered in a palette of black and silver paint, Nawa rotated the vertical canvas ﬁfteen degrees and dripped paint from the top edge of the painting, allowing the material to ﬂow naturally with the weight of gravity. As the paint slowly made its way down the canvas, it left behind bold parallel stripes of varying thicknesses. The stark geometric result evokes movement, direction, and gravity while simultaneously investigating the physical phenomena of liquid materials. Direction #120 pushes the boundaries of painting, as the artist’s hand is completely removed, and the artistic process is transmuted into form, repetition, and ﬂow.

Thomas Nozkowski

Thomas Nozkowski is recognized for his richly colored and intimately scaled abstract paintings and drawings that push the limits of visual language. For the artist, an awareness of perception and the desire to explore the possibilities of seeing is at once grounded in reality and released from specific legibility.

Nozkowski’s concurrent practices of painting and drawing reflect specific places and experiences—from the deeply symbolic to the notational—translating sensations and memories into abstract compositions. His paintings draw from personal experience: objects, ideas, books, places, and, more often than not, his reverent walks through nature. Expanding the possibility of landscape painting and the physical presence of an abstract form with each negotiation of the picture plane, Nozkowski’s paintings offer a view of the world that is both rooted in the subjective terrain of experience and an otherworldly space of art and vision.

Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen’s complex and pioneering work examines the systems and technologies that shape society. Computing systems that collect, interpret, and operationalize data that deﬁnes and tracks identity, movement, and habits fuel the artist’s broad practice. Paglen’s Bloom series recalls the vanitas tradition in art, in which symbolic objects such as ﬂowers remind us of mortality, the fragility of life, and the vanity of worldly pleasures. In contrast to the vanitas paintings of the 15th and 16th century, Paglen plays with these symbolic tropes, bringing them into the present day and addressing new measures of mortality in the digital era such as Zoom, AI, policing, and even threats such as COVID-19.

Bloom (#7a5a4e) (2020) is part of a series of large-scale photographs that depict ﬂower formations conceptualized by various computer vision algorithms created to analyze the constituent parts of real-life photographs. The colors and shapes in the images represent similar areas that the AI has detected in learning from other images of ﬂowers. The varying densities within the ﬁnal image do not represent naturally occuring colors so much as what the AI has previously identiﬁed as a “ﬂower.”

Joel Shapiro

The work of Joel Shapiro engages with the American minimalist tradition—prevalent during his formative years spent studying in New York during the 1960s—while simultaneously considering a modernist approach to ﬁguration. By combining a bold, geometric reﬂection on form with an economy of line and mass, Shapiro’s sculptures are more suggestive than representational. Eschewing gender, race, and physique in favor of a thorough examination of a person’s relationship to space and their surroundings, Shapiro’s ﬁgures reﬂect the universality of the human condition. They have become a popular feature for public commissions, as the artist presents over 30 public sculptures worldwide.

Untitled (2017–2019) is in keeping with the stick-ﬁgure compositions begun by Shapiro in the 1980s. Here, ﬁguration is distilled to six rectangular shapes, reducing the almost life-sized human form to sharp lines and hard corners while still retaining a dynamism of implied movement that engages and excited the viewer. Conveying a pioneering approach to balance, Shapiro’s sculptures often depict a ﬁgure in the act of dancing, running, jumping, contorting, or falling, always choreographed in just a way as to seemingly simultaneously defy, and succumb to, earth’s gravitational pull. Untitled encapsulates Shapiro’s amalgamation of postmodernist Minimalism and Geometric abstraction, with an additionally playful approach to color and composition.

Raqib Shaw

Raqib Shaw mines the personal experiences of both his childhood in Kashmir, India, and his emigration to the UK in 1998 to create labor-intensive artworks that unite eastern and western iconography and visual history. Shaw’s practice centers around the use of enamel paint diligently applied and manipulated with a porcupine quill to achieve an impressive level of meticulous detail and surface texture. Additionally, Shaw furnishes his opulent, paradisal scenes with gemstones and rhinestones, as well as embossed gold detailing comparable to the traditional cloisonné technique used in early Asian pottery. Though incorporating fantastical subject matter and fanciful narratives, Shaw’s artworks are rooted in the artist’s rich and diverse interests and inﬂuences, including Persian carpets and miniatures, Japanese architecture and ceremonial garments, Renaissance paintings, and medieval heraldic symbols.

The ﬁve chapters of Summer Dance each depict an avian-human hybrid, resplendent in bejeweled ﬁnery, energetically performing in a celebratory or ritualistic manner. Playing traditional Indian instruments such as a sitar, tabla and a sringa—references to Shaw’s Kashmiri heritage—the ﬁve mythical characters form an orchestral ensemble surrounded by parakeets, ﬂowers, blossoming plants, platters of ripe fruits and ornate tumblers of wine. The scene depicted across the ﬁve panels of Summer Dance is typical of Shaw’s lavish and luxurious portrayals of a personal, imagined utopia.

Pace Gallery will present Raqib Shaw’s latest solo exhibition at the gallery’s Geneva location in June 2021.

Arlene Shechet

Arlene Shechet’s expansive approach to sculpture has led her to experiment with materials as diverse as plaster, porcelain, clay, and cast paper. Since the mid-1980s, she has crafted a new visual lexicon of richly textured, chromatic, and visceral surfaces. In the last decade, Shechet worked extensively with ceramics, engaging in the delights of a chance-based process that allows her to robustly manipulate her materials—casting, painting, ﬁring, carving, and stacking clay with no predetermined end.

Sudden Love (2018) demonstrates Shechet’s technically demanding glazing method that produces seductive, textured surfaces in wide chromatic variation. The polymorphic form of Sudden Love provides a stunning visual contrast between the sculpture’s distinct ridges and its deep, hollowed cavities. Here, Shechet harnesses the inherent hollow nature of ceramics to create an astonishing object that is at once architectural and ﬂuid.

James Siena

Following his “visual algorithms”—a predetermined and self-imposed series of rules, restrictions and requisites—James Siena’s practice is guided by ﬁxed parameters. Renowned since the early 1990s for his meticulously rendered enamel on aluminum works, Siena also applies his procedural precision to a variety of mediums, including drawing, lithography, etchings, engravings and woodcuts. Siena’s interest in artiﬁcial intelligence, mathematics, linguistics, and semiotics are evident in his intricate linear abstractions that portray labyrinthine compositions sequenced by the artist’s unique geometries. Perhaps surprisingly, Siena’s repetitive, formal, and immensely detailed depictions are all rendered and patiently delineated by the artist himself, eschewing mechanical aid and embracing a freehand approach to draughtsmanship. Many have described Siena’s elaborate, methodical, maze-like constructions as possessing a hypnotic attraction; viewing them is akin to a spiritual or meditative experience.

For his new series of watercolor works on paper, Siena returned to earlier experiments with watercolor monoprints as a means of further expanding upon the conceptual underpinning of his recent large-scale acrylic on canvas works, exhibited with Pace Gallery in New York as part of his 2019 solo exhibition Painting. Here, Siena uncharacteristically accepts the unpredictable nature of watercolor—its loose liquidity softening and relieving the linear geometries. The present series—produced during the recent Covid-19 lockdown—focus on cropped portions of the modular units portrayed in the earlier paintings. Siena allows the studies to breach the extremities of the paper, implying the continuation of the pictorial plane. With both the medium and the compositions appearing unconﬁned and unrestricted, Siena continues to examine notions of emergent form and resonances but with a novel sense of liberation.

Marina Perez Simão

Rooted in the natural landscape of her native Brazil, Marina Perez Simão’s luminous watercolors pulse with a magnetic, musical, and hypnotic presence. Inﬂuenced by painters such as Tarsila do Amaral, Agnes Pelton, and Luchita Hurtado, Simão’s work is situated within a larger constellation of artists who similarly employ landscape to explore the metaphysical elements of nature. With the artist’s new series, Simão presents a symbol of hope—a beacon for a future not yet mapped out but ﬁlled with inﬁnite possibilities.

Building on the artist’s process of combining her memories with literary and musical references to create singular, abstracted landscapes, Simão’s new body of work reﬂects the evolution of her artistic practice while quarantining in Brazil this past year. Neither solid nor liquid, sky nor ground, the shapes in Simão’s works defy material classiﬁcation. Her watercolors and paintings, comprising disparate references and visual cues, often leave the viewer with a sense of continued wonder.

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith rose to prominence in the 1980s with her deﬁant and uncompromising approach to ﬁguration, directly challenging the established views of conventional ﬁgurative art with her unﬂinching portrayal of taboo topics such as AIDS, gender politics, death, and decay. Since then, Smith’s practice has continuously developed and come to encapsulate spirituality, mythology, and mortality, all often examined with respect to the contrasts and similarities existing between the human condition and the natural world. Encompassing sculpture, printmaking, photography, textiles, glasswork, and drawing, Smith’s multidisciplinary and multifaceted practice takes inspiration from many historical visual traditions such as religious relics, folkloric craftsmanship, biological diorama, Byzantine iconography, and medieval memento mori.

Enchantment (2019) is a bronze sculptural depiction of a mermaid, one of Smith’s most enduring and oft-recurring motifs, initially employed by the artist as she began to incorporate natural imagery into her humanoid ﬁgurative works. The aquatic human-ﬁsh hybrid embodies not only Smith’s unwavering approach to ﬁguration that is at once personal and universal but also the artist’s use of folklore, mythology, and fairytales to reﬂect upon society and human nature. This metallic mermaid is also reminiscent of Smith’s other repeated tropes, the marionette, as its two-dimensional joints imply articulation similar to that of a child’s hand-made paper puppet.

Leo Villareal

Leo Villareal works with LED lights to create complex, rhythmic artworks for both gallery and public settings. He focuses on identifying the governing structures of systems and is interested in base units such as pixels and binary code. Villareal is interested in synesthesia and the remapping of the senses. He creates works that exist purely as light but evokes elaborate sonic worlds.

Villareal’s Optical Machine series draws upon a history of practices engaged with mass imagery, mechanical reproduction, and the materiality of light. Optical Machine IV (2020) uses LED lights and custom software to translate the layered and sequential logic of systems into beguiling visual experiences that, although abstract, echo the organic behaviors and networks found in nature. Inspired by the rules that govern cellular automata, Villareal develops underlying structures that form complex cosmological models.

Brent Wadden

Synthesizing traditions of painting, design, craft and folk art, Brent Wadden’s work is the antithesis of mass-produced, machine-made textiles. At every stage of creation, from sourcing the yarn to stretching the finished material over a raw canvas, Wadden is in control. Much like a painter using different types of paint, Wadden uses an array of yarn—including cotton, wool, acrylic, and handwoven fibers—to imbue his artworks with a sense of depth and tangibility. From afar, Untitled (2017) might be mistaken for an abstract painting, but up close, the work reveals a multitude of handwoven hues and textures. In this way, Wadden’s expert handling of material, composition, and color confounds our expectations of media and discipline, surface, and texture.

Wadden’s work celebrates what might be considered ‘mistakes’ or ‘imperfections’ in another context by rejecting seamless joins or perfect alignment. It is a purposeful signal to viewers that the work results from a labor-intensive, diligent practice that Wadden has been honing for many years. Wadden has not only formed a method that is distinctively his own, but he also collapses the hierarchies of disciplines, interrogating the boundaries that separate painting from textile, art from craft, decorative from functional.

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson’s use of glass has become a unifying element of his career ever since he ﬁrst began to explore the possibilities of the medium nearly twenty years ago. Since 2001, Wilson has worked alongside prominent American glassblower Dante Marioni with whom he ﬁrst explored the materialrange of black-colored glass. During this time, Wilson produced his ﬁrst black glass drips.

Wilson has continued to make drip works, including Spill Spread Splice Splurge (A.A.) (2017), a multi-piece installation featuring a series of black drips cascading towards the ﬂoor. The reﬂective surface of the blown glass and the teardrop-like forms suggest liquids such as ink, oil, blood, and tar, and are blown from red glass so dense that it appears black.

To inquire about any of the artists or works featured in this presentation, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

Past, Frieze New York, May 4, 2021