Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance
Pace Gallery, New York
January 17 – March 1, 2025
© The Estate of Pedro E. Guerrero
Celebrating its 62-year history with LOUISE NEVELSON (1899–1988), Pace presents Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance, a major exhibition of Nevelson’s late works, curated by gallery founder Arne Glimcher, at its 540 West 25th Street location in New York. This show places Louise Nevelson’s iconic monochromatic sculptures in black and white in dialogue with her collages—including several rarely seen and never previously exhibited masterworks—made in the 1970s and 1980s.
Like Piet Mondrian’s, Nevelson’s compositions are based on a strict adherence to vertical and horizontal regularity. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was a significant development: Louise Nevelson incorporated the diagonal into her vocabulary. A new, angular energy surfaced in many of the works she produced during this period, breaking the rules by which she traditionally composed her work.
These late works shed new light on her evolving aesthetic, bringing into focus a series of remarkably productive years of her practice in which she experimented with a new vocabulary of robust, muscular, and often minimal forms while staying true to her lifelong investigations of materiality, shape, and shadow.
Rooted in the legacies of Cubism and Constructivism, Louise Nevelson’s artworks were widely celebrated during her lifetime for incorporating unexpected combinations of materials and forms. As part of her distinctive approach to abstraction, the artist often explored the myriad possibilities of collage—a technique she transposed into sculpture by means of compartmentalized elements and forms liberated from everyday meaning. Nevelson’s use of the collage aesthetic was formalist. Her art of scavenging and her affinity for the materiality of wood are linked to her personal life and her remarkable story.
Since Louise Nevelson’s death there has been a series of radical re-appraisals of her work, especially as new frameworks and dialogues in art history have emerged in recent years. The gallery’s presentation in New York coincides with a global upswell of interest in her work, which is underscored by a forthcoming retrospective of the artist organized by the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, opening to the public this fall. In April, ahead of the Pompidou-Metz's show, solo exhibitions of Nevelson's work will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at Pace's Seoul gallery.
Drag, Color, Join, Face
By Julia Bryan- Wilson
Yale University Press, 2023
This past year, Louise Nevelson was honored in memoriam at the Art Students League’s annual gala in New York—the artist was an alumna of the institution—and in 2022, a sprawling exhibition of her work, Louise Nevelson: Persistence—curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Columbia University professor and author of Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale University Press, 2023)—was presented as an official collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale, and her work was also included in the main exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Pace presented its first solo show of work by Louise Nevelson in 1961 in Boston, and it has represented the artist—with whom the gallery’s Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher maintained a decades-long friendship—since 1963. Early in their relationship, Nevelson took the young Glimcher under her wing, introducing him to all of the most important Abstract Expressionist artists and bringing him into the fold of the New York art world. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, Arne Glimcher helped Louise Nevelson achieve a new level of international recognition, supporting her in the production of numerous large-scale public commissions around the United States and the world. Opening at the beginning of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, this Louise Nevelson exhibition reflects the artist’s enduring and deeply personal relationship with Arne Glimcher, and her indelible place in the gallery's history and its ethos today.
Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance showcases two of Nevelson’s rare white-painted wood sculptures—Study for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and the never-before-exhibited Dawn’s Light, both created circa 1975—among her signature black-painted wood sculptures, including the large-scale freestanding composition Cascade- Perpendiculars XXX (1980–1982). Louise Nevelson specifically spoke about the relationship of her black and white works to the perceptual thresholds of dawn and dusk, the liminal, transitional, and indiscernible moments between day and night. Harkening back to her famed large-scale, all-white sculptural installation Dawn’s Wedding Feast (1959)— which was presented at the Museum of Modern Art as a single installation before being split into separate parts— Dawn’s Light speaks to the ways that Nevelson’s later expressions were guided by the project of transformation and transfiguration that energized her practice for more than four decades.
The gallery’s presentation also features Artillery Landscape (ca.1985), a single sculpture consisting of a group of individual floor-based elements, which was exhibited for the first time as part of Louise Nevelson. Persistence in Venice in 2022. Never before seen in the United States, this sculptural installation comprises reclaimed wooden artillery boxes found, reconstructed, and painted black by Nevelson in the last few years of her life. The hinged box- like elements of Artillery Landscape refer back to Nevelson’s psychologically charged Dream House series of the early 1970s, yet the title of the work derives from the origin of the boxes themselves, scavenged and repurposed artillery containers for artillery. Of her interest in reclaimed materials, Louise Nevelson once said, “I wanted to show that wood picked up on the street can turn to gold.”
Highlights in the exhibition include three wall-mounted works from the Mirror Shadows series of magisterial wall reliefs, one of the last bodies of work that Louise Nevelson produced and among her most innovative. Alongside these important late sculptures, a selection of Nevelson’s collages attest to her intensely personal and private mode of expression, which she kept mostly secret during her lifetime. In the economy of Nevelson’s studio, the collage works emerged simultaneously with her monochromatic sculptures as extensions of the same creative gesture. Providing a new avenue for explorations of color, light, shadow, reflection, and line, these works incorporate combinations of metallic foil, cardboard, sandpaper, tape, wood, spray paint, printed paper, and newspaper. Tearing and re- combining traces of the past to produce a raw, unfiltered beauty, Louise Nevelson developed an aesthetic of fragmentation and reassembly in her collages that animated the spirit of all her work.
LOUISE NEVELSON
Louise Nevelson (b. 1899, Kiev; d. 1988, New York), a leading sculptor of the 20th century, pioneered site-specific and installation art. She is best known for her monumental sculptures composed of discarded furniture and wooden elements found near her New York City studio. Louise Nevelson arranged these elements into nested, box-like structures, she would then paint them in monochromatic black, white, or gold—transforming disparate elements into a unified structure. She also experimented with bronze, terracotta, and Plexiglas, eventually moving into the realm of collage, works on paper, and public art. With her compositions, Louise Nevelson explored the relational possibilities of sculpture, summing up the objectification of the external world into a personal landscape. Although her practice is situated in lineage with Cubism and Constructivism, her sense of space and interest in the transcendence of the object reveal an affinity with Abstract Expressionism.
Louise Nevelson has been the subject of over 70 one-artist exhibitions, including over ten traveling exhibitions, held at institutions worldwide including The Jewish Museum, New York (1965, 2007); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1967, 1970, 1980, 1987, 1998, 2018); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1973, 2017); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1986); and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1997).
Recent exhibitions include Louise Nevelson In L.A.: Tamarind Workshop Lithographs From the 1960s, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015); Reflections: Louise Nevelson, 1967, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts (2017); The Fourth Dimension, San José Museum of Art, California (2017); The Face in the Moon, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); Louise Nevelson, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019–2020); Louise Nevelson: Sculptor of Shadows / Skyggernes Skulptør, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark (2020–2021); Louise Nevelson: Dawn to Dusk, Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine (2023–2024); and The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas (2023–2024).
Louise Nevelson’s work is held in over 140 public collections worldwide including The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; The Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Tate, London, among many others.
PACE GALLERY, NEW YORK
540 West 25th Street, New York City
