Study of a Cutlass Coupe by Adriano Valeri — Adriano Valeri, *Study of a Cutlass Coupe*, 2018 © Adriano Valeri

Online

Wildflowers in the Concrete Jungle

The Pace Staff Show

Aug 17 – Sep 17, 2022

This online exhibition, titled Wildflowers in the Concrete Jungle, highlights artworks by staff across four of Pace’s global locations. On view from Wednesday, August 17 through Saturday, September 17, this presentation amplifies the diverse lived experiences of Pace’s staff through an exhibition format that is accessible to a wide audience.

Featuring 39 works by 31 staff members from Pace’s New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Geneva galleries, Wildflowers in the Concrete Jungle serves as a group portrait of the creativity and imaginative power of the gallery’s staff. Focusing on ideas and representations of home amid various ongoing global crises, the exhibition facilitates communal celebrations of beauty, spotlighting the unique backgrounds and familial histories of Pace’s staff members.

For many, home is not a fixed place. Banan Al-Nasery, a staff member at Pace in Geneva, describes a kaleidoscope of movement and beauty in her video work Made Some Friends Along the Way (2021), saying, “Having experienced war, immigration, and their attendant changes and adaptations, I was able to realize how love can be found in the collapse of separations, frontiers, and distances: in movement.”

For others, the idea of home is linked to explorations of spiritual connections and imagined altered realities. Tapestry of Home (2022), a work by Joyce Lee, a staff member at Pace’s Hong Kong gallery, “invokes thetheme of a spiritual home where subjects drawn from Chinese imperial art and iconography represent thelove, harmony, and blessings that sustain us daily.”

Some works in the show make use of abstraction as a tool to navigate memory and emotion. Jason Peabody, a staff member at Pace in Los Angeles, states, “The inspiration behind The Departure of Our Creature Comforts Into Their Own Voids (2022) evolved out of observing loss and change of comfort all over the world. The pandemic, civil rights protests, armed conflict, and countless political absurdities have kept us at home, prevented us from going home, and in many cases, stripped people of their homes.”

Works in this online exhibition traverse time, cultures, and global histories to bring us to central connecting point: art. As Amanda Kopp from Pace’s New York gallery says, “Painting evokes a sense of comfort that, forme, is similar to home, as it's something I've always been able to come back to.”

Continuing the tradition of Pace staff exhibitions, Wildflowers in the Concrete Jungle follows the 2021 group exhibition Atmospheres in New York. This online exhibition is presented by the Exhibition Engagement sub-committee of Pace’s Culture & Equity Committee.

The Foundation

Art is something that is created and revisited and functions as a place of continuous return. The artists in The Foundation have built a home in a place of creation and collaboration in their own art practice and through the works of others.

Amanda Kopp

"Painting evokes a sense of comfort that, for me, is similar to home, as it's something I've always been able to come back to. The paint is applied with a roller in chaotic organic form and is then controlled by the charcoal linear outlines. In particular, the Content & Controlled Series (AK242) evokes memories. This is the fourth work I created with this technique, which has continued and grown ten years later."

Amanda Kopp

Todd Kelly

"Each piece I make begins with the structure of traditional painting: canvas over wooden stretcher bars. I then challenge that tradition by exasperating compositional norms, piercing the canvas surface, collaging photographs, adding sculptural elements, and including various unconventional materials. The collaged images are chosen for their formal qualities directly from my iPhone camera roll as a traditional artist would choose colors from a palette. The images depict my living and working spaces and a variety of candid moments from my life, guaranteeing that however far from tradition my work may travel, it feels very much like 'home' for me."

Todd Kelly

Pejman Shojaei

"'Home' is an idea that is not bound to any one location. For many, the idea of home is found through the written word. Fran Lebowitz is quoted as saying 'a book is not supposed to be a mirror—it's supposed to be a door.' It is through this door that one is able to find 'home.'"

Pejman Shojaei

Jason Nickel

"As an artist, I have often thought that nostalgia is a bad word: the rose-colored longing for a past that never really was, the lie we tell ourselves in order to cope with the existential pain of the NOW. Upon further examination, I realized that art itself is inescapably nostalgic, a human act that reaches back in time to our ancestors, a human endeavor that would have zero contemporary meaning were it not for the centuries of time we have invested in it. This seems most true for painting. I realized that I am nostalgic, nostalgic for a pre-internet age, or, for that matter, a pre-industrial age. I wonder if the greatest paintings have already been painted and I am simply playing out defunct formalisms, devoid of signification, yet meaningful to the game.

As a child, I moved a lot. I have no hometown, no attachments to any place. I have found this unfettering and refreshing. My father was a minister who came from a long line of ministers, and I chose art as my spiritual path. My studio is the only physical place where I do feel at home. As the title suggests, Black Crucifix No. 7 is the seventh work from a series of black crucifix paintings. These paintings evoke my ancestry, my cultural home, and lineage. The figure itself is taken from a Michelangelo drawing, and I must admit that I truly do have nostalgia for a rose-colored view of the Renaissance and the marvels created by long dead artists, but my home is the studio, and the studio can only be a place of unfettered renewal for which there is no home."

Jason Nickel

John Richey

"Untitled (pareidolia 017) is a hand-woven cyanotype textile about how themes of stability and entropy can coexist in a single discrete artwork. Its vibrant blue and white composition is made up of two separate photographic images that have been physically cut apart and woven back together by hand to create a new abstract composition. Bits and pieces of recognizable imagery are obstructed and revealed through the simultaneously ordered and chaotic patterning. This woven assemblage recalls a nostalgic memory of home: wispy cloud formations as viewed through a window screen, the comfort of one's favorite worn flannel shirt, and the beauty and calm of waves moving over the surface of a body of water. It is a unique paper textile that references the natural world and alludes to the ephemerality of the spaces around us."

John Richey

Francesca Clerjeune

"It’s the fire kindling through the night

between two lovers and a child

keeping the home alive.

Lighting for the midnight hours of the lost

and graveyard shifters.

The slow burn flickering flame; back, forth, then upright positions

wax melting as hearts do

falling out of form but also into place."

Francesca Clerjeune

Daniel Bruce

"This sculpture was staged outside my studio in Long Island City and photographed by my good friend and colleague Ed Davis. The work consisted of an old wagon wheel with modern lock and chain. It was situated as being tethered to a telephone pole in order to create this photographic documentation."

Daniel Bruce

Nick Kantarelis

"This piece came about following a geode crystal hunting trip I went on with my 11 and six-year-old daughters. After cracking open rocks and seeing the intricate world inside, we were inspired to assemble our own.

It is made of silicon rubber, acrylic plexiglass, and tempered glass prisms. The prisms were inspired by my younger daughters input to make it 'rainbow' colored. There is an LED inside of the piece that illuminates it from inside. We programed the palette of the LED dynamic color sequence and chose which colors flowed into each other. We complied photographs we took from the places we were born, have lived, and will always consider home—like California, Massachusetts, Greece, and Hawaii. They chose the photos with colors they liked, which were mostly of the sea, sky, mountains, flowers, and forests, and we set how long each color would last before fading into the next.

It was very fun to include their input in my work and I look forward to many more years of collaborations. The name of the piece is a combination of their names: Verazel & Alyra."

Nick Kantarelis

The Spiritual

Connections that extend beyond physical embodiment create a reflexive conversation on meaning, being, and otherworldliness. In the works featured in The Spiritual, home is conveyed through a sense of spirituality, cosmic interventions, and divine relationships.

Deja Belardo

"No one has ever held me as closely as this land

Its DNA in my blood from open wounds

The waters that have carried my body so effortlessly,

but also tumbled me in its motion and brought me back to land

The soil has held my tears and blossomed the brightest of flower trees

My knees covered in mud as I've called to God on my knees"

Deja Belardo

Chris Camperchioli

"When thinking of home, we tend to think of a particular location—a country, a state, a house—but home is also cosmic. It is everything that ever was and will be, for us anyway, on the small stage which we occupy. I made this painting thinking about creation. How does 'home' begin and who or what is responsible for it?

In Gnosticism, archons are the builders of the physical universe. They are also deceivers intent on preventing souls from leaving this realm. I see archons all around us today—dark psychic forces, both human and economic, lurking under the surface and presented to us in the media, always sure that the world they've created is the home we deserve.

The painting itself is meant to be hallucinatory. Its subtle rainbow color suggests a drug trip—a world fracturing or disappearing intoa more fluid space. Through mirroring and the attack of gestural brushwork I tried to create a new overall gestalt. A third entity fashioned from spectacle and material, both seductive and sinister."

Chris Camperchioli

Joyce Lee

"Tapestry of Home invokes the theme of a spiritual home where subjects drawn from Chinese imperial art and iconography represent the love, harmony, and blessings that sustain us daily.

This work, which was painted over a period of a decade and completed in 2022, expresses my thoughts on the topics of being, regeneration, and resilience."

Joyce Lee

Justin Horne

"My paintings initiate a reflexive conversation about meaning by conflating physical, psycho-emotional, and aesthetic landscapes."

Justin Horne

Terrance James

Seasons 3 by Terrance James — Terrance James, *Seasons 3*, 2015-2019, Archival Inkjet prints, 20" × 16" (50.8 cm × 40.6 cm)

Seasons 4 by Terrance James — Terrance James, *Seasons 4*, 2015-2019, Archival Inkjet prints, 20" × 16" (50.8 cm × 40.6 cm)

"Home for me is a psychological state of being. My grandma was always my earthly tether—a grounding force that essentially fortified my family and my idea of home. Her passing shook me in unimaginable ways. I learned that grief wasn’t this boogeyman, but something even more frightening: an introspective conversation with oneself. My grandma shaped so much of who I am that when I look in the mirror, I see her eyes gazing back.

In this series, titled The Seasons, I present four self-portraits that signal grief, anxiety, metamorphosis, and evolution. Home is within, so I dedicate this series to my grandma, Barbara Ann Mines Livas."

Terrance James

Daniel Kingery

"From my iPhone self-portrait works, this series of paintings is based on screen shots of music I'm listening to as an emotional shorthand and form of autobiography. This particular painting refers to spiritual experiences I've had and to finding my wife. In the painting, John Lennon, on the cover of his first solo record, leans against Yoko Ono, who leans against a tree, which can represent God or the presence of God in all things. They seem to be melting into nature, becoming one with it, with God, andwith each other. Home here is both a place in nature, removed from worries and cares, and the comforting presence of the one you love, surrounded by divine grace. John and Yoko traversed cultural and ethnic boundaries with their love, and the same can be said for my wife Liseth, who is Colombian, and myself, having lived in Berlin for over a decade. John and Yoko become stand-ins for us and for so many couples that fall in love in different countries and contexts, and the painting evokes the kind of peace, happiness, and sense of home that couples can feel together."

Daniel Kingery

Christine Lee

"My mother grew potted pothos ivy plants in our first home. She snaked their vines up the wall and anchored any new growth around the perimeter of the ceiling until they engulfed the harsh angles of the concrete room. Nightly, I fell asleep under this canopy of curving leaves, and they filled my dreams with colorful scenes of the jungle.

Moving across oceans, my mother evermore grew plants that interrupted the squares of the house and invited a lush warmth into each home she kept. My memories of home are tinged with greenery, meandering tendrils, and peeks of vibrant flowers that bloomed and went despite the seasons.

My medium, thread on paper, usually lends itself to variations of the grid or other strictly linear forms. In a departure, this work incorporates lines that flow organically across the paper and curlicues that are scattered about the grid, recalling the familiar scenes of my home."

Christine Lee

Matthew Ardell

"When I was growing up in rural upstate New York, I would try to shake my loneliness by exploring the land and the woods near my home. I remember walking through my backyard during the winter, in awe of the beauty of the freshly fallen snow. I carry the serenity from these solitary moments in my memory, and it still inspires me years later. Although I now live in New York City, my psychological need for nature is undeniable. I try to recreate these moments in my art in order to create balance within the urban landscape I occupy today."

Matthew Ardell

The Transition

Adapting and documenting the changing world around us, these works highlight the journeys and shifts that disrupt stability in our lives. In The Transition — home — or the lack thereof, is reflected through movement, migration, and the special places we visit in our lives.

Jason Peabody

"This painting comes from a growing body of work created over the past two and a half years. The inspiration behind The Departure of Our Creature Comforts Into Their Own Voids evolved out of observing a loss and change of comfort all over the world.

The pandemic, civil rights protests, armed conflict, and countless political absurdities have kept us at home, prevented us from going home, and in many cases, stripped people of their homes.

This abstract expression is a depiction of longing for the dissipated creature comforts found at home and within family.

It feels as though almost every day a given comfort departs into a void of no return. Since these voids are intangible, this piece is an attempt to depict them and their action of swallowing up the comforts that make home possible and pleasant."

Jason Peabody

Jumoke McDuffie-Thurmond

"This piece is an invitation to consider depictions Black aliveness—of Black life beyond its proximity to anti-Black violence. This kinetic mantra aims to utilize repetition of easeful movement as a counter to the violent images of Black death that are repeatedly circulated in various forms of media. Through this piece, I also aim to interrogate how freedom and a sense of home in oneself can be accessed through movement practices."

Jumoke McDuffie-Thurmond

Click Here to Inquire

Adriano Valeri

"When I came to the US as a child, I was very interested in the size and shape American made cars, much bigger and more angular than I had seen growing up in Italy. This painting is of an unspecified Oldsmobile Cutlass Coupe model from the mid 1980s. I chose to represent it in a state of abandonment and partial decay at the center of a lush, perhaps polluted, suburban area."

Adriano Valeri

Evan Robidioux

"Growing up, home is a safe place where you can learn and grow, but when you lose that place you lose a sense of safety. This work is about the loss of my childhood home and my transition to finding myself in a new place in this world while dealing with no longer having that safety net of being able to go home to the place you've called that for the past 20 years."

Evan Robidioux

John Zinonos

"'Home' is forever a journey—at times static and anticipated, and at other times filled with ever surprising adventure."

John Zinonos

Madeline Gilmore

"I once spent ten days in a Tuscan village called Vagli di Sotto, site of a man-made lake and its submerged ghost town. There was nothing to do—I was there to write. Every morning I memorized a poem. Every afternoon I walked the perimeter of the drying lake. I saw wildflowers growing at the foot of the mountains, wild hogs resting in the dirt. For a moment I constructed a home out of those images, my routine. I inhabited them, knowing everything was temporary, knowing a life is a collection of feelings you must eventually release. One of those feelings is home. I have not been back to Vagli di Sotto since."

Madeline Gilmore

Patrick Grady

"The Manasquan Inlet is a man-made canal that divides the northern and southern halves of New Jersey and acts a passage to the Intracoastal Waterway. It was constructed in 1931 by the Army Corps of Engineers with rock excavation from Manhattan's Second Avenue subway line. Sitting approximately 900 feet out into the ocean, 50 miles from New York City, two impressions of home reside in one."

Patrick Grady

Banan Al-Nasery

"Having experienced war, immigration, and their attendant changes and adaptations, I was able to realize how love can be found in the collapse of separations, frontiers, and distances: in movement. Because everything moves, always, and because there was never a static home for me, I had to turn within to find the steadiness of such a place, and I found it in presence, in the 'background' of all experiences, the feeling of being. We can be at home anywhere when we can feel it within..."

Banan Al-Nasery

Click Here to Inquire

Peter Fikaris

"In the mid 90s I spent a few weeks in Odessa as a visiting artist living and working with a number of local sculptors and craftsmen. This was a unique experience because my Greek ancestors had lived there from the 1800s through the 1920s and had a very successful business trading linens and sweets from the Island of Chios. My time there was very memorable and sort of a homecoming—I was able to walk the streets and track down the house where they lived and worked.

Now, the city that I love is under constant bombardment reducing it to piles of rubble. Odessa Burning illustrates Russia's continued effort to destroy and extinguish this great and thriving metropolis."

Peter Fikaris

The Memory

The expression of home in the works featured in The Memory serve as emotional shorthand and forms of autobiography. Here, fragments of memory become visual representations of the past, the continuum of emotion, and ephemerality.

Deja Belardo

Calil Argeudas-Russell

"This work explores themes of language and family; it sets its stake on the 'inheritance' of feeling at peace in one's own home."

Calil Argeudas-Russell

Click Here to Inquire

Sarah Prickett

"'Sun Gold' is a variety of cherry tomato that produces small but intensely flavorful orange fruits. Growing up, I spent many summer nights sent out into someone's garden—my grandmother's, my parents', family friends'. Kids picked fresh somethings for dinner and would return to lively commentary about the perfect zucchini or unusual carrots retrieved. This year, I was excited to start my own outdoor garden: a tomato plant in a bucket. I send myself out onto the fire escape to water and see the tiny green orbs turn gold. When we talk on the phone, my dad and I usually begin with, 'How are your tomatoes?'"

Sarah Prickett

Soyoon Lee

"Windows Series 1 is a mixed media work composed with materials that evoke a deep emotion of nostalgia of my childhood growing up in South Korea.

Windows often evoke a nostalgic feeling of 'home.' The scenery and landscapes I observed through windows as a child constitute majority of the memory of Korea, and it has embedded in me a deep gratitude for its unique beauty. The work, Windows Series 1, is composed of pink and green organza fabric, commonly used to make a traditional Korean dress, or Hanbok.

Sowed on the fabrics are beads and threads I found in the sewing bag I used as a child living in Korea. Ink drawings that are scattered around the fabrics are like the remnants of memories of 'home' that continue to live on."

Soyoon Lee

Matthew Ardell

Elizabeth Miller

"A few months ago, my mom got a new notebook for work, and she wanted me to draw something for her on it to make it prettier and remind her of me. I drew this frog because I thought it was cute, and her favorite color is green. So, not only is this frog an organic observation of our environment, but it also reminds me of home and my mom."

Elizabeth Miller

Paul Paillet

"The work depicts a head floating in the air in front of the entrance to a small building on a narrow Belgian street. A lamb can be seen on a panel above the head. This street, called 'the street of the lamb,' was known as a place to buy and sell heroin. This image represents many years of teenage memories and a familiar place that is now off limits to me. The vivid and sometimes acidic colors of the painting reflect feelings of sweetness and violence."

Paul Paillet

Arne Glimcher

To inquire about works featured in Wildflowers in the Concrete Jungle, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

Journal

View All

Past, Wildflowers in the Concrete Jungle, Aug 17, 2022

Wildflowers in the Concrete Jungle

The Pace Staff Show

The Foundation

Amanda Kopp

Todd Kelly

Pejman Shojaei

Jason Nickel

John Richey

Francesca Clerjeune

Daniel Bruce

Nick Kantarelis

The Spiritual

Deja Belardo

Chris Camperchioli

Joyce Lee

Justin Horne

Terrance James

Daniel Kingery

Christine Lee

Matthew Ardell

The Transition

Jason Peabody

Jumoke McDuffie-Thurmond

Adriano Valeri

Evan Robidioux

John Zinonos

Madeline Gilmore

Patrick Grady

Banan Al-Nasery

Peter Fikaris

The Memory

Deja Belardo

Calil Argeudas-Russell

Sarah Prickett

Soyoon Lee

Matthew Ardell

Elizabeth Miller

Paul Paillet

Arne Glimcher

To inquire about works featured in Wildflowers in the Concrete Jungle, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

Journal

All the World in a Painting