Irving Penn: Kinship
Curated by Hank Willis Thomas
Pace Gallery, New York
November 15 – December 21, 2024
Three Dahomey Girls (with Bowls), 1967
Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation
Three Single Oriental Poppies, New York, 1968
Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation
Pace is pleased to present Irving Penn: Kinship, an exhibition of work by the famed photographer IRVING PENN, curated by artist Hank Willis Thomas, at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This show spotlights works produced by Irving Penn throughout his 70-year career, including selections from his Worlds in a Small Room series, his iconic portraits of artists, actors, and writers, and other genres of his images. These photographs are exhibited within an installation designed by Hank Willis Thomas to replicate a structure that Irving Penn used to photograph many of his high-profile subjects.
Working for Vogue for nearly 70 years, Irving Penn left an indelible mark on the history of photography. His inventive fashion photographs, which transformed American image-making in the postwar era, continued to appear in the magazine up until his death in 2009. The artist was also highly accomplished and experimental in the darkroom, having engineered, among other innovations, a complex technique for making platinum-palladium prints.
A trained photographer, Hank Willis Thomas, widely known for his galvanizing public works around the US, is deeply interested in both the making and consumption of images. His investigations into subjectivity and perception inform his work in photography and other mediums, including sculpture, screenprinting, video, and installation. Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room works—for which he journeyed to Cuzco, Crete, Extremadura, Dahomey, Cameroon, San Francisco, Nepal, New Guinea, and Morocco to capture people’s portraits within a tent he used as a portable studio—have been particularly influential for Hank Willis Thomas, who was part of the artistic team behind the traveling, participatory installation In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth), which debuted in 2011 and has since been presented around the world.
Often investigating the ways that framing and perspective can shape our experiences of the world around us, Hank Willis Thomas situates Irving Penn’s photographs within a bespoke, star-shaped structure with intersecting corners, created using a material similar to the plywood flats of the photographer’s original studio for his portraits in a corner. Displayed on the structure’s exterior walls and within its central interior space, Irving Penn’s images will invite viewers to inhabit a similarly intimate, enclosed space as the subjects of his portraits captured across the globe—through Thomas’s vision, this room becomes a new world of its own.
Showcasing the varied but interconnected motifs and ideas that Irving Penn returned to time and again over the course of his life, the images selected and paired by Hank Willis Thomas speak to a transcendent, universal quality that can be traced across the photographer’s vast oeuvre. His arrangement of Penn’s works is guided by a kind of “visual muscle memory,” which he describes as “the notion that an artist’s eye and hand retain the imprints of past works, unconsciously shaping new creations.” The diverse photographs on view, for Thomas, are marked by their stillness and dignity, their shared interest in capturing and communicating the human experience in a single frame.
“In Penn’s work, I see a profound reverence for the overlooked and the mundane,” Hank Willis Thomas writes in a curatorial statement for the show. “His fashion photography, often celebrated for its clean lines and sculptural compositions, shares a surprising kinship with his still lifes of discarded objects. By juxtaposing these images, I want to highlight how Penn’s meticulous attention to detail elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. It’s as if each image, regardless of subject, carries an echo of his broader artistic ethos: the belief that beauty and meaning can be found in even the most unlikely places.”
Concurrent with this curated presentation in New York, Hank Willis Thomas’s solo exhibition of his work at Pace’s London gallery, Kinship of the Soul, is on view through December 21. A retrospective of Penn’s work, organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with The Irving Penn Foundation, is on view through May 1, 2025 at The Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in A Coruña, Spain.
Hank Willis Thomas’s work is currently featured in the group exhibitions Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 18, 2025 and Grow It, Show It: A Look at Hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, through January 12, 2025. At the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The Gun Violence Memorial Project—a collaboration between Boston-based MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where Thomas is Creative Director, in partnership with the gun violence prevention organization Purpose Over Pain—is on view through January 20, 2025.
PACE GALLERY NEW YORK
508 West 25th Street, New York City
