Elmgreen & Dragset @ Pace Gallery, Los Angeles - "The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" Exhibition

Elmgreen & Dragset

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

September 13 – October 25, 2025

Pace presents The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, Elmgreen & Dragset’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles—and their fourth with the gallery. This immersive two-part presentation will occupy the main exhibition space and the adjacent south gallery, exploring themes of scale, perception, and psychological distortion through enactments of doubling and resizing. The show follows Elmgreen & Dragset’s recent solo presentations at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, and it coincides with the artists’ thirtieth anniversary of working as a duo and the twentieth anniversary of their famed "Prada Marfa" installation, which was unveiled in Texas in 2005.

Renowned for their subversive sculptural interventions, Berlin-based artists Elmgreen & Dragset often examine questions of identity and belonging in their collaborative practice, and they are particularly interested in radical recontextualizations of objects and new modes of representation in sculpture and large-scale installation.

In The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the artists explore how scale influences our understanding of reality. For this presentation, the duo plays with the physical features of Pace’s Los Angeles gallery, using the architectural division of the gallery as a framework for doubling and resizing. Each artwork is presented in full scale in the main gallery, while exact half-size versions are shown in the adjoining space, which the artists have rescaled into a half-size replica of the main space. This spatial reduplication and resizing is inspired by the neurological condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, or Dysmetropsia, in which shifts in perception, often triggered by fatigue, alter one’s experiences of distance and scale.

The first work that visitors will encounter in the exhibition is a hyper realistic sculpture of a female gallery assistant slumped over the reception desk, seemingly asleep. The surreal presentation that follows in the exhibition spaces, where objects appear out of scale, could be a vision or dream playing out in her mind, in which visitors are the protagonists.

The main gallery space will feature new sculptural works and wall pieces—works from the duo’s Sky Target series—that probe the boundaries of the real and the reflected, the seen and the sensed. In their circular Sky Target paintings, fragments of clouds drifting across blue skies are rendered on mirror polished stainless steel disks. The skies are partially obscured by reflective surfaces, allowing viewers to glimpse themselves within illusory “heavens.” Each Sky Target is named after a specific location that the artists have visited. Two circular wall works, which the artists refer to as “stripe paintings,” will also be on view. In these works, vertical bands revealing airplanes and their contrails in the sky alternate with equally sized bands of mirrored strips, creating a rhythm of image and reflection. The tension between transparency and opacity, and representation and self-awareness, is heightened by the viewer’s shifting position within the space.

Two figurative sculptures carved in marble will be presented on the floor of both the main and adjacent galleries. One of these works depicts two young men, both wearing VR goggles, embracing—physically close but mentally elsewhere. The other shows a young man seated with headphones, absorbed in his own auditory reality. These figures embody the contemporary condition of disconnection, amplified by digital mediation. The immateriality of the digital experiences represented in both works is contrasted with their medium, marble, a historically significant and physically durable material that is deeply rooted in the tradition of sculpture.

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome invites visitors into a mise en abyme of visual and spatial contradictions. While much of our reality has been compressed into the format of an iPhone screen, Elmgreen & Dragset continue their investigations into how physical environments shape our sense of self and how bodily presence still plays an important role in the way we interact with our surroundings.

ARTIST DUO ELMGREEN & DRAGSET

Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark; Ingar Dragset, b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway) pursue questions of identity and belonging and investigate social, cultural, and political structures in their artistic practice. They are interested in the discourse that can ensue when objects are radically re-contextualized and traditional modes for the representation of art are altered. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. They have presented numerous solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide including Kunsthalle Zürich (2001); Tate Modern, London (2004); Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2009); ZKM - Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013–14); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2016); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2018–19); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2019–2020); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); and Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023–24). In 2009, they represented both the Nordic and the Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They are renowned for large-scale public installations including Short Cut (2003), an installation comprising a Fiat Uno and a camper trailer, which appear to emerge from the ground; Prada Marfa (2005), a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique installed along U.S. Route 90 in Valentine, Texas; and Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), a gigantic vertical swimming pool placed in front of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Their work is held in public collections worldwide, including ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Art Production Fund, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Kistefos Museet, Jevnaker, Norway; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.

PACE LOS ANGELES

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Sonia Gomes @ Pace Gallery, London - "É preciso não ter medo de criar" Exhibition Curated by Paulo Miyada

Sonia Gomes 

É preciso não ter medo de criar

Pace Gallery, London

October 14 – November 15, 2025

Sonia Gomes 

Raw | Cru, 2025 

© Sonia Gomes, courtesy the artist 

and Mendes Wood DM 

Photo by Ding Musa

Pace presents É preciso não ter medo de criar, the first solo exhibition in the UK by São Paulo-based artist SONIA GOMES, on view at its gallery in London. Curated by Paulo Miyada, the exhibition will feature all-new works, including the artist’s signature pendants and torsions, alongside paintings and new sculptural explorations in bronze. Sonia Gomes will sign copies of her new catalogue, Assombrar o mundo com Beleza (I Haunt the World with Beauty), at the opening reception on Monday, October 13, from 6 to 8 p.m.

One of Brazil’s foremost contemporary artists, Sonia Gomes combines second-hand textiles with everyday materials such as birdcages, driftwood, and wire to create abstract sculptures that reclaim traditions rooted in Afro-diasporic experiences and craft modes of artmaking from the margins of history. In 2015, she was the only Brazilian artist invited by the late curator Okwui Enwezor to the Arsenale exhibition of the 56th Venice Biennale, and in 2018, she became the first living Black woman artist to receive a monographic exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Last year, in 2024, she returned to Venice, showing work as part of the Holy See Pavilion for the 60th Venice Biennale.

Born in 1948 in Caetanópolis, a former textile hub in Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil, Sonia Gomes has cultivated a singular practice anchored by her deft and meticulous manipulation of varied materials. Across these transformations, her approach remains rooted in gestures of care and reinforcement: sewing, tying, and wrapping.

The exhibition’s title—translated as “one must not be afraid to create”—is drawn from Clarice Lispector’s 1943 novel Near to the Wild Heart and has guided Gomes’s embrace of new materials and techniques for this show. In addition to her ongoing experimentation with found and gifted fabrics, Gomes has created bronze sculptures for the first time. These forms—casts of textile-wrapped tree burls and branches—extend the artist’s visual language, highlighting the tension between vulnerable materials and elevated finishes. This relationship recurs in a new group of wall-mounted works made from reclaimed lumber, transformed by the artist with gold leaf and fragments of a 19th-century liturgical vestment. Rectangular in form, they bring together weathered wood and gilded surface, continuing Gomes’s engagement with contrast and transformation.

A major new work included in the show, titled Tereza (2025), fuses a group of Gomes’s previously unrealized pendant works into one commanding form. Suspended from the ceiling and meandering through the exhibition space, this sculpture holds a vital, organic quality. In Brazilian Portuguese prison slang, tereza refers to the makeshift ropes used in escape attempts that are often fashioned from tied-together bedsheets and other fabrics. Gomes’s hanging works, such as this one, embody the word’s liberatory implications, allowing their textile remnants—carriers of collective and individual memory—to slip free from oblivion.

The artist’s Torção (torsion) sculptures, two of which feature in the exhibition, emerge from a single line. To create these, Gomes engages her whole body in describing the sculpture’s composition with uncoiled construction wire and steel reinforcing bars for the base. Choosing from her extensive trove of fabrics, Gomes forms the sculpture’s body by wrapping, twisting, tying, weaving, and stitching scraps of these materials around and through its skeleton. In her studio, she separates handcrafted textiles—such as laces, embroideries, and knits—from industrially made materials, treating the former as compositional tools and the latter as a color palette. In a new wall-based Torção included in the exhibition, Gomes has explored an unprecedented level of openness in her composition: for the first time leaving one extreme of the spiral-wire structure hanging freely in the air.

Other highlights include two-dimensional artworks from Gomes’s Raio de Sol (Sunbeam) series and new paintings. Throughout these, open and expansive forms layer and coalesce. These gestures, created by Gomes in Posca pen, watercolour, acrylic, thread, beads, and oil, recall the spiral forms that are deeply embedded in cyclical conceptions of time. In one work, Gomes has woven history into the present by embedding within it a 2.3 × 1.5 m length of shibori-dyed, hand-stitched cotton—crafted in two days by Bai artisans on China’s Tibetan border and first encountered by the artist in a London market in 2019—so that the fabric’s contorted surface collapses past and present into a single poetic return.

Since 2018, Sonia Gomes has been modifying six volumes of Enciclopédia de Fantasia (Encyclopaedia of Fantasy), a collection of classic children’s fables gifted to her by a friend. A video work included in the exhibition—the artist’s first foray into the medium—shows a dreamlike version of this process in which Gomes’s interventions and additions fluidly interact with the text and pages.

Concurrent with her exhibition in London, Gomes’s first-ever solo museum show in the United States, Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas! The exhibit at Storm King Art Center is on view through November 10. She is also presenting works in the Glass Pavilion at Louvre-Lens, France, until early next year, and at Instituto Tomie Ohtake in November 2025.

Artist Sonia Gomes

Sonia Gomes (b. 1948, Caetanópolis) combines secondhand textiles with everyday materials, such as furniture, driftwood, and wire, to create abstract sculptures that reclaim Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminized crafts from the margins of history. Juxtaposing tensile and slack forms, Gomes’s contorted sculptures exude a corporeality and dynamism that she attributes to her love of popular Brazilian dances. Sonia Gomes uses found or gifted fabrics, which, according to her, “bring the history of the people that they belonged to.” “I give a new significance to them,” she adds. Her assemblages thus tie Brazil’s historical trajectory to the long-disregarded narratives of women, people of color, and countless anonymous individuals.

Through its recycling of used fabric, Gomes’s work also evinces a principle of thrift that is both a consequence of Brazil’s rapid and uneven industrial development and a dissenting answer to its accompanying culture of wasteful consumption and environmental destruction. As a whole, her art is marked by a decolonizing impulse, providing oblique responses to the social inequities and ecological urgencies of present-day Brazil and, more broadly, a globalized world.

Gomes’s work is represented in numerous collections around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Rubell Museum in Miami; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas; the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro; the Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil; both the Guggenheim New York and Abu Dhabi; and Tate in London.

PACE LONDON

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Lauren Quin @ Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery represents Lauren Quin

Portrait of Lauren Quin

Photograph by Lee Thompson

Lauren Quin 

Lowing, 2024 

© Lauren Quin, courtesy Pace Gallery

Photo by Marten Elder

Pace announces its representation of the Los Angeles-based artist LAUREN QUIN, who is known for her expansive, vibrant abstractions in which she orchestrates layers of colors, patterns, and symbols to describe, deconstruct, and interrogate the entanglement of real and pictorial space. Quin’s repertoire of dynamic movements and noncompositional forms create pulsating networks of marks and countermarks, which churn and fluctuate between the concrete and the ephemeral. 

Often working at large scale, Lauren Quin constructs her paintings methodically from an arsenal of recurring gestures and techniques. Expressionistic brushstrokes are truncated by channels carved across a painting’s surface, creating sculpted fissures in images that Lauren Quin further disrupts through passages of monoprinted ink, which she weaves between layers of paint. Turbulent and engrossing, her works are as much excavated as they are made. Past and present mingle on the surfaces of her canvases, interrupting and distorting one another.

Drawing is an essential part of Quin’s process. Rather than a compositional map, drawing serves as a compass, a tool for orienteering. In her work, painting is revealed as a wilderness—the act of painting involves the risk of getting lost, of giving up the notion of fixity in space and language. Amidst this painterly derive, Lauren Quin deploys and re-deploys symbols from her ever-expanding archive of drawings, anchoring her process and linking one painting to the next.

The poetic substrate of Quin’s abstraction is temporality. In each work, Lauren Quin interrogates the unfolding of painterly time while also producing an altogether different kind of time. “You can span time inside a painting because when you look at it, you don’t read it left to right; you start to enter, circle, and travel,” Lauren Quin has said. “It takes a long time for a painting to unfold.”

Quin’s representation by Pace follows her New York solo debut in 2024 at 125 Newbury, a project space helmed by Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher. Entitled Lauren Quin: Logopanic, the exhibition was presented in two parts, bringing together a new body of work. In the 125 Newbury Free Press, Arne Glimcher wrote that Quin’s paintings “knocked me out by their power, intensity, and ravishing beauty … They were overwhelming, like storms harnessed at the moment of exquisite danger.”

Lauren Quin’s first solo exhibition with Pace will open in Los Angeles in February 2026. Her work will be featured prominently in the gallery’s booth at the upcoming edition of Frieze Seoul in September. 

Artist Lauren Quin

 

Born in Los Angeles in 1992, Lauren Quin received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to her 2024 exhibition at 125 Newbury in New York, the artist has presented solo shows at the Pond Society in Shanghai and Blum & Poe in Los Angeles in recent years. In 2023, she mounted her first US museum exhibition, 'My Hellmouth', at the Nerman Museum of Art in Overland Park, Kansas.

Lauren Quin’s paintings are included in major museums collections internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Pérez Art Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Long Museum and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. 

PACE GALLERY

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Robert Longo: The Weight of Hope @ Pace Gallery, New York

Robert Longo: The Weight of Hope

Pace Gallery, New York

September 12 – October 25, 2025

Pace presents The Weight of Hope, a monumental exhibition by ROBERT LONGO, in New York from September 12 to October 25. As a sequel to the Milwaukee Art Museum’s recent presentation of Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History—curated by Margaret Andera, the institution’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art—Robert Longo will take over Pace’s entire 540 West 25th Street gallery, exhibiting 26 drawings, three films, two sculptures, and 30 studies across the flagship’s first, second, third, and seventh floors as well as its exterior. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s new catalogue for The Acceleration of History, featuring contributions from Margaret Andera, artist Rashid Johnson, and journalist Tom Teicholz, will be released during the run of Pace’s show and available to purchase on-site at the gallery. A Pace Live performance, featuring musician Rhys Chatham, organized as part the exhibition will take place on Wednesday, September 10, and an opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 11 from 6 to 8 p.m. Both events will be open to the public, and further details will be announced in due course.

The Weight of Hope will highlight Longo’s enduring engagement with social and political happenings in his work across mediums, bringing together large-scale charcoal drawings, films, sculptures, and studies—including private and institutional loans—created between 2014 and 2025. This landmark show at Pace will open on the heels of the artist’s first full-scale Scandinavian survey, on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark through August 31, and his presentation of a new multimedia work at Art Basel Unlimited in June.

Over the past decade, the artist has increasingly turned his focus to images from the media, including coverage of the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the Black Lives Matter movement. Building up his hyper realistic, black-and- white charcoal drawings in layers with painstaking attention to light and shadow, he creates highly detailed works based on news photography as well as images of protests, civil unrest, and war on the Internet. Transforming his source images into epically scaled, emotionally resonant compositions, he reflects on power, violence, and national mythmaking. His works slow down the “image storm” and “culture of impatience” in which we live through the historic and venerable medium of charcoal, encouraging viewers to take time to absorb and process the turbulence of the current moment—both in the US and around the globe—while also proposing hope for the future.

“As artists, we’re reporters,” Robert Longo said in a recent interview for his Louisiana Museum of Modern Art exhibition. “Our job is to report what it’s like to be alive now. We’re one of the few professions left in the world that has the opportunity to try to tell the truth. I feel a moral imperative to preserve the images of our shared dystopic present with the hope that something will one day change.”

Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, Robert Longo was deeply influenced by social and political issues from an early age. He graduated high school in 1970, weeks after the Ohio National Guard massacred several students at Kent State University who were protesting the US invasion of Cambodia—including one of Longo’s former classmates, whose body was shown in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that shocked the world. In 1973, Robert Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he trained as a sculptor and began his decades-long friendship with fellow artist Cindy Sherman. The two moved to New York together in 1977, and, throughout the 1980s, Robert Longo frequently performed in New York rock clubs in Menthol Wars, his band with Richard Prince. During this period, he also designed album covers for numerous bands and directed music videos for New Order and R.E.M.

In his first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York in 1981, Robert Longo showed his charcoal and graphite Men in the Cities drawings, works that became icons of the “Pictures Generation.” This group, which includes Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, and David Salle, is known for critiquing the anaesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media through their art. Working with diverse materials at increasingly ambitious scales over the course of his career, Robert Longo cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. Today, his work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Tate in London; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and many other international institutions.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

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Robert Longo

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna, September 4, 2024 – January 26, 2025

Robert Longo: Searchers 

Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac, London , October 9 – November 9, 2024 

Paolo Roversi @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Along the Way" Focused Retrospective Exhibition (early 1990s - present)

Paolo Roversi: Along the Way

Pace Gallery, New York 

September 12 – October 25, 2025

Paolo Roversi 

Natalia, Paris, 2003

© Paolo Roversi, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of work by photographer PAOLO ROVERSI at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Opening on September 12, during New York Fashion Week, and running through October 25, this focused retrospective will feature works produced by Paolo Roversi between the early 1990s and the present, highlighting the artist’s relationships with his many collaborators in the fashion industry.

Roversi’s upcoming exhibition with Pace in New York—his first solo show with the gallery since 2019—will present an overview of his storied career through a selection of photographs created over the past 35 years.“Every portrait is a meeting, an exchange, a mutual intimate confession,” Paolo Roversi has said of his work. The show will shed light on Roversi’s legacy as the artist behind some of the most iconic fashion images of our time.

Drawing inspiration from the work of August Sander, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus, Paolo Roversi developed a distinctive style that is deeply influenced by the Byzantine architecture and rich cultural history of his birthplace, Ravenna, Italy. “Paolo's photography is timeless,” Sylvie Lécallier, curator Roversi’s 2024 exhibition at the Palais Galliera in Paris, said in an interview last year. “It is detached from the spirit of the times, from the ephemeral trends of fashion. It is located both at the heart of fashion and at the edge.”

Made with Polaroid film and mostly taken in his Parisian studio, Roversi's dreamlike, enigmatic images are imbued with a classical sensibility. His studio, he has said, “is a place for the chance, the dream, the imaginary to prevail. I give these forces as much space as I can.”

In addition to his collaborators in the fashion world, Polo Roversi has recently joined forces with his friend and fellow artist Sheila Hicks. For these works, which will figure in Pace’s exhibition, no discussion is had between the two artists regarding a direction for the final work, each knowing and respecting the other’s practice.

Born in Ravenna, Italy in 1947, Paolo Roversi discovered his passion for photography during a 1964 family holiday in Spain— upon his return from the trip, he built a darkroom in the basement of his home. He began his career in 1970, taking photojournalism assignments from the Associated Press. In 1973, at the invitation of photographer and ELLE art director Peter Knapp, Paolo Roversi moved to Paris, where he has lived and worked ever since. After a nine-month period assisting British photographer Lawrence Sackmann, whom he cites as an influential teacher, Paolo Roversi started shooting independently with small commissions for ELLE and the band Depeche Mode, gaining wider recognition with a Dior beauty campaign in 1980 and ultimately forging his reputation as one of the industry's leading photographers by the mid- 1980s. As model Guinevere van Seenus, who has worked with Roversi for nearly three decades, has said, “Having your portrait taken is more than just looking at the camera, [Paolo] creates the space for the person to [emerge]."

Today, Paolo Roversi’s work can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has had major exhibitions around the world—in recent years, at the Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Palais Galliera in Paris, the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, and Dallas Contemporary in Texas—and has published numerous books, including Paolo Roversi: Palais Galliera (2024), Lettres sur la lumière, with philosopher Emanuele Coccia (Gallimard, 2024), Des Oiseaux (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2023), Paolo Roversi – Studio Luce (Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, 2020), Natalia (Stromboli, 2018), and Nudi (Stromboli, 1999).

PACE NEW YORK

508 West 25th Street, New York City

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Claes Oldenburg @ Pace Gallery, Tokyo - "いろいろ / This & That" Exhibition

Claes Oldenburg 

いろいろ / This & That

Pace Gallery, Tokyo

July 17 – August 23, 2025

Claes Oldenburg 

Geometric Mouse--Scale B, 1970-72 

© Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Pace Gallery

Claes Oldenburg

Miniature Soft Drum Set, 1969 

© Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Pace presents This & That, an exhibition of work by American artist CLAES OLDENBURG, at its Tokyo gallery. Bringing together sculptures and prints that exist in series created by the artist between the 1960s and mid 2000s, this lively survey showcases the importance of multiplicity in Oldenburg’s practice, inviting visitors to immerse in the artist’s madcap world and uncover resonances and touchpoints to Japanese culture. Curated by Pace CEO Marc Glimcher and Maartje Oldenburg—daughter of Claes Oldenburg and his wife and longtime collaborator Coosje van Bruggen, and head of the artists’ estates—the exhibition is organized as part of the gallery’s 65th anniversary year celebration. It is also be Pace’s first major presentation of Oldenburg’s work since the gallery announced its global representation of the Claes Oldenburg estate, the Coosje van Bruggen estate, and the Oldenburg and van Bruggen estate, continuing its commitment to sharing the intertwining legacies and individual achievements of the two artists with its global

audience. 

The Japanese title of the gallery’s presentation is いろいろ (“Iroiro”), which roughly translates to “various,” “variety,” or “miscellany.” Suggesting a mixed-bag or a hodgepodge, “Iroiro” can also be written as 色々, which comprises a repetition of the Kanji character 色 (“Iro”). “Iro” literally means “color,” but it typically refers to the color or hue of things. It can also suggest an object’s general appearance, and even more metaphorically, can refer to the sensuality of a thing (as in the occasional English usage of the word “colorful”). “Iroiro” thus echoes Oldenburg’s almost passionate involvement with banal objects, the way he lovingly coaxed a vast array of ordinary, miscellaneous things from their humdrum existence in the normal course of life—the "this and that”—into subject-matter for serious artistic inquiry.

In a broad sense, Pace’s show sheds light on Oldenburg’s fascination with multiplicity, the act of artistic reproduction, and the mutability of imagery. Widely known for the monumental artworks he realized around the world with Coosje van Bruggen, he also created many domestically sized objects across a wide variety of media throughout his career. “The multiple object,” he once said, “was for me the sculptor’s solution to making a print.”

This exhibition in Tokyo is the first major presentation of Oldenburg’s work in the Japanese capital since 1996. The artist’s only other solo show in the city took place in 1973 at Minami Gallery. Notably, he debuted his large-scale Giant Ice Bag (1970) sculpture, which is animated by mechanical and hydraulic components, in the US Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka. Since 1995, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s large-scale sculpture Saw, Sawing has been on public view outside the Tokyo International Exhibition Center. Oldenburg’s sculptures Inverted Q (1977–88) and Tube Supported by Its Contents (1983) can be found in the collections of the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, respectively.

Claes Oldenburg—who presented his first solo exhibition with Pace in 1964—was a leading voice of the Pop Art movement who, over the course of more than six decades, redefined the history of art with his sculptures, drawings, and colossal public monuments that transform everyday objects into idiosyncratic entities. He rose to prominence in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he was among the artists staging Happenings—a hybrid art form incorporating installation, performance, and other mediums—on the city’s Lower East Side. Collaborative and ephemeral, these environments included The Street (1960) and The Store (1961)—his first solo presentation with Pace featured works from The Store. Following his work with props in these Happenings, Claes Oldenburg began creating his iconic soft sculptures, which charted new frontiers in the medium, upending its traditional contents, forms, and materials.

Claes Oldenburg and Pace’s Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher maintained a friendship for 60 years, working closely from the early years of the artist’s career up until his death in 2022. Since the 1960s, Pace has presented Oldenburg’s work in some 30 exhibitions and produced seven catalogues dedicated to his practice. The gallery also supported Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s creation of the large-scale sculptures Typewriter Eraser, Scale X (1998-99), which is part of the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Balzac Pétanque (2002), which is in the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Floating Peel (2002) at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, among many other projects.

Claes Oldenburg

N.Y.C. Pretzel, 1994 

© Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Pace Gallery

Among the works in the gallery’s Tokyo show are some 60 multiples of Oldenburg’s painted cardboard sculpture N.Y.C. Pretzel (1994)—these works will be presented in a vending machine vitrine near the entrance of the gallery space. Other multiples in the exhibition include the artist’s cast plaster Wedding Souvenir (1966), his painted aluminium and brass Profiterole (1989–90), and his sewn canvas Mouse Bags (2007–17), all of which speak to his engagement with the quotidian, from the food we eat to pop cultural icons like Mickey Mouse.

In the way of larger-scale sculpture, This & That features Tied Trumpet (2004), a knotted bright yellow trumpet rendered in aluminum, plastic tubing, canvas, felt, and foam, and Miniature Soft Drum Set (1969), a set of nine sewn screen-printed elements on canvas. Another highlight is Knife Ship 1:12 (2008), an aluminum and mahogany wood reprisal of the monumental Knife Ship that Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen presented as part of their legendary 1985 performance Il Corso del Coltello (The Corse of the Knife) in Venice, Italy—this storied, site-specific project, realized by the artists in collaboration with curator Germano Celant and architect Frank Gehry, centered around a boat in the shape of a Swiss-army knife, which was floated down the city’s canals.

Claes Oldenburg 

Alphabet in Form of a Good Humor Bar, 1970 

© Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Pace Gallery

A 1976 screenprint of the Knife Ship superimposed onto the image of the Guggenheim Museum in New York—an artwork that predates the performance—is also be included in This & That. Other prints on view at Pace in Tokyo will be Alphabet in Form of a Good Humor Bar (1970), which renders the alphabet in the shape of an ice cream bar; The Letter Q as Beach House, with Sailboat (1972), where Claes Oldenburg imagines the letter ‘Q’ as a towering waterfront home; and the artist’s Apple Core prints, each representative of one of the four seasons, from 1990.

Through his iterative and elastic process of translating imagery from one medium to another—and suggesting innumerable possible transformations as part of that process—Claes Oldenburg expanded the possibilities of art by inviting the viewer to look again. Taken together, the works in this exhibition reflect his uncanny ability to render the familiar strange, and to imbue magic and wonder into the most mundane of subject matter.

Maartje Oldenburg is the daughter of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen and is the head of the artists’ estates. A writer, editor, and lawyer, Maartje Oldenburg formally studied Japanese language, literature, and history for many years. She lived and worked in Japan in the 1990s.

Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929, Stockholm; d. 2022, New York) is renowned for his sculptures, drawings, and colossal monuments that transform familiar objects into states that imply animation and sometimes revolt. A leading voice of the Pop art movement, Oldenburg came to prominence in the New York art scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. His seminal installations The Street (1960) and The Store (1961) launched his career, subverting artistic and institutional conventions while creating a backdrop for happenings and performances under the production name Ray Gun Theater. Initially conceiving of monumental works based on everyday items in drawings and collages, Claes Oldenburg installed his first realized outdoor public sculpture, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969–74), during an antiwar protest at Yale University in 1969. He subsequently collaborated for over three decades with Coosje van Bruggen to create largescale projects across the world. Conflating notions of art and banality, and high-brow and low-brow, the investigation of objecthood spans Oldenburg’s earliest production to his work today.

PACE GALLERY TOKYO

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A

5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo

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Trevor Paglen @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Cardinals" Exhibition

Trevor Paglen: Cardinals

Pace Gallery, New York

June 26 - August 15, 2025

Trevor Paglen 

Near Lichau Creek (undated), n.d. 

© Trevor Paglen, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of work by TREVOR PAGLEN at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This focused presentation features photographs of novel aerial phenomena captured by the artist in the American West over the last two decades. Bringing together a selection of prints and polaroids, this show will explore the relationships between UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) sightings, Artificial Intelligence, and the rise of disinformation in today’s media environment—which has all but obliterated the notion of ‘truth.’ As Trevor Paglen has said, we live in “a historical moment wherein our relationships to text, images, information, and media are being entirely upended,” and UFOs, deployed by the US military and intelligence agencies as psychological instruments since the 1950s, “blur lines between perception, imagination, and 'objective' reality, whatever that may or may not be.”

The artist, whose rigorous practice spans photography, sculpture, video, and installation, is known for his investigations of invisible phenomena and forces, including technological, scientific, socio-political, and historical subjects. Through his work, Trevor Paglen has explored Artificial Intelligence, surveillance, data collection, and militarism in America, meditating on the ways these issues influence modes of perceiving and relating to the natural world—from the landscapes of the US to the cosmological realms beyond the Earth.

“UFOs live in the latent space between the material, the sensible, and the perceptual,” Trevor Paglen said of his enduring interest in the history of UFO photography. “They inhabit the crossroads of fear, desire, logic, and hope. They produce communities of believers and debunkers, and dreams of divine salvation, endless energy, impossible physics, dark conspiracies, and existential fears.”

The otherworldly, entirely undoctored photographs on view at Pace in New York this summer depict diminutive UFOs amid sprawling landscapes near US military test sites and training bases in California and Utah, including one near Robert Smithson’s seminal land artwork Spiral Jetty. Trevor Paglen has been capturing his UFO images since 2002, often while carrying out research and site visits for other projects. Exploiting the hyper memetic qualities of the UFO, he insists on the mysteries of his images by withholding information about what exactly he has captured—in some cases, the contents of these photographs are unknown to the artist as well.

He produced these photographs with various cameras: a Phillips Compact II 8x10, a Wista 4x5 field camera, a Pentax medium-format handheld, a Canon 35mm, and two digital medium-format cameras, one modified to shoot infrared. Most of the works in this series were shot on analog Kodak Portra, T-Max, or Fuji FP Instant film.

Paglen’s UFO photographs can be understood in conversation with his body of images of “unids,” or “unidentifieds”—the many hundreds of unknown objects in orbit around the Earth that are monitored and tracked by the US military—which he captured using infrared telescopes in remote locations. Atmospheric and mysterious, these skyscapes, which figured in Paglen’s 2023 solo show with Pace in New York, show the light trails of “unids,” drawing out the abstracted, textural qualities of the cosmos.

Concurrent with his exhibition of UFO photographs at Pace, Trevor Paglen is presenting work in the group exhibition "The World Through AI", on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris through September 21, 2025.

TREVOR PAGLEN (b. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland) is known for investigating the invisible through the visible, with a wide-reaching approach that spans image making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines.

The clandestine and the hidden are revealed in series such as The Black Sites, The Other Night Sky, and Limit Telephotography in which the limits of vision are explored through the histories of landscape photography, abstraction, Romanticism, and technology. Paglen’s investigation into the epistemology of representation can be seen in his Symbology and Code Names series which utilize text, video, object, and image to explore questions surrounding military culture and language. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.

Trevor Paglen has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2019); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2015); Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2015); Protocinema Istanbul (2013); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013); and Vienna Secession (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008, 2010, 2018); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); Tate Modern, London (2010), and numerous other institutions.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

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James Turrell: The Return @ Pace Gallery, Seoul

James Turrell: The Return

Pace Gallery, Seoul

June 14 - September 27, 2025

James Turrell 

After Effect, 2022 

© James Turrell, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of five recent installations by James Turrell—including a new, never-before-seen, site-specific Wedgework made specifically for this presentation—at its Seoul gallery. Spanning all three floors of the gallery, The Return also features a selection of photographs and works on paper that shed light on the artist’s process for his installations and the construction of his massive Roden Crater project. Marking Turrell’s first solo exhibition in Seoul since 2008, this show is organized as part of Pace’s 65th anniversary year celebration, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions around the world of work by major artists with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships. 

Born in Los Angeles in 1943, James Turrell is a key member of the California Light and Space movement. He has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed “perceptual art,” working with the materiality of light and space. Influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest work focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with light, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception. Since his Projection Pieces from the 1960s, his work with light and perception has expanded in various series, including his Skyspaces, which he began creating in 1974, and his Ganzfelds, which he initiated in 1976.

Today, the artist is known worldwide for his immersive installations that, he says, require “seeing yourself seeing.” His work can be found in major museum collections around the globe, including the Museum SAN in Wonju, Korea, which is home to five of his installations; the Bonte Museum on Jeju Island in South Korea; the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima Island in Japan; the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. With his monumental, ongoing Roden Crater project near Flagstaff, Arizona, James Turrell is forging a large-scale artwork and naked-eye observatory within a dormant volcanic cinder cone in the landscape of the Painted Desert of Northern Arizona.

Arne Glimcher, Pace’s Founder and Chairman, first met James Turrell some 60 years ago, and the gallery has represented him since 2002. The artist’s presentation in Seoul—his first ever solo show at Pace’s space in the Korean capital—is an ode to the longevity of his relationship with Arne Glimcher and Pace. The Return includes a new, never-before-exhibited Wedgework installation—in which planes of projected light intersect within a darkened room, lending light a “thingness” through which the room seems to expand beyond its physical limits—made by James Turrell this year. Also featured are two large, curved glass installations, a circular glass installation, and a diamond-shaped glass installation. In these pieces from the Glassworks series, shifting planes of light give the illusion of infinite depth. Rarely exhibited together, these Glassworks of different sizes and dimensions are installed throughout the Seoul gallery, offering visitors a special opportunity to experience the breadth of the artist’s recent work.

The works on paper complementing these installations, which the artist has been producing over the course of his career, speak to the importance of printmaking in Turrell’s practice. At Pace in Seoul, he is showing his new series of Wedgework prints, which explore the chromatic variations and formal possibilities of the Wedgework installations. Works related to the artist’s Roden Crater project also figure prominently in the exhibition, alongside aquatints and woodcuts that depict qualities of light in Turrell’s 2014 installation Aten Reign at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Artist James Turrell

James Turrell, associated with the Light and Space Movement initiated in the 1960s, has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed perceptual art, investigating the immaterial qualities of light. Influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest work focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with it, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception. Since his earliest Projection Pieces (1966–69), his exploration has expanded through various series, including Skyspaces (1974–), Ganzfelds (1976–), and perhaps most notably, his Roden Crater Project (1977–), a large-scale work in a volcanic cinder cone in the Painted Desert region of northern Arizona. Turrell’s practice has also materialized in small-scale works, including architectural models, holograms, and works on paper.

PACE GALLERY SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

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Mary Corse @ Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

Mary Corse

Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

June 21 – August 16, 2025

MARY CORSE

Untitled (White Diamond with Black 

Reflective Inner Band), 2024 

© Mary Corse, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new works by Mary Corse at its Los Angeles gallery. This presentation marks the artist’s first gallery show in LA since 2017 and her first solo exhibition in the city since her 2019 survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Corse’s show at Pace in Los Angeles features new paintings and her 'Halo Room', a new architectural installation that she has been developing over the past few years. Holistically, the exhibition will trace her latest experimentations in painting, shedding light on her radical inquiries into the phenomenological dimensions of art and her role as a key figure in the LA arts community for more than six decades.

Throughout her storied career, Mary Corse—who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since she was a student at the city’s Chouinard Art Institute in the 1960s—has explored light, space, and perception in sublime, scientifically rigorous, and boundary-crossing abstractions across mediums. She is often associated with the California Light and Space movement and has always been committed to the possibilities of painting as her primary concern. As part of her empirical and highly tactile approach to art making, she has continually investigated the ways in which light can be both subject and material.

A sunset drive along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu in the late 1960s changed the course of her practice. Searching for a way to embed light inside her paintings, Mary Corse investigated the industrial materials in the illuminated road markings along PCH and discovered glass microspheres. Soon after this revelatory event, she began applying these refractive microspheres onto the surfaces of her White Light paintings, endowing her works with a sense of illumination projected from within the picture plane itself that changes with the viewer’s position.

The artist’s presentation at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery centers on her new body of Diamond paintings—a continuation of the first diamond-shaped canvases she made in 1965—and includes several never-before- exhibited works produced this year. With her latest Diamond paintings, Mary Corse delves deeper into the fundamental concepts that have defined her practice from its outset. She expands the scope of her inquiry into the metaphysical dimensions of her oeuvre through new iterations of ideas that have long been essential to her work. In addition to Corse’s Diamond paintings, the show features one of her iconic, glowing light boxes. Early in her practice, the artist’s efforts to free her artworks from the wall led her to quantum physics, and she subsequently created a series of highly engineered light boxes, which she referred to as “light paintings.” Suspended using monofilaments, the light boxes are powered wirelessly by Tesla coils—high-frequency generators that transmit electromagnetic fields through walls, producing uncanny, spectral effects.

The exhibition also showcases Corse’s new 'Halo Room', an architectural installation that debuted in her 2024 presentation at Pace’s New York gallery. This work, which is installed in the Los Angeles gallery’s outdoor courtyard, offers a participatory, intimate experience of scale, space, and light. When a viewer enters the room, they encounter a white light painting and as they approach the painting the resulting effect produces a glowing halo around the viewer’s shadow, registering their presence but also incorporating it into the painting itself.

This installation hinges on the energetic relationship between individual and object, producing a moment of intersubjective collision that facilitates a spiritual manifestation of bodies within space. Up to two participants will be allowed inside the installation at a time, and each viewer will only be able to see their own halo—a phenomenon that speaks to the personal nature of experiencing Corse’s art. The presence and presentness of the viewer within the Halo Room become a pure expression of grace, reflecting the ethos that has animated Corse’s practice for decades: as she puts it, “the art is not on the wall, it’s in your perception.”

ARTIST MARY CORSE

Mary Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, California) investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her sixty-year career. Earning a BFA in 1968 from Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, Corse developed her initial work during the emergence of the Light and Space movement in Southern California. Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes. In 1968, Mary Corse 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. First developing her White Light paintings, by the 1970s she began making her Black Light series with black acrylic and microspheres. The Black Earth works followed-large ceramic slabs that she fired in a custom-built kiln and glazed black. After thirty years of working monochromatically, she reintroduced primary colours into her paintings based on her understanding of colour as constitutive of white light. Corse’s art emphasizes the abstract nature of human perception, expanding beyond the visual to include subtleties of feeling and awareness.

In 2021, Mary Corse was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai which traveled to the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul. Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, the artist’s first solo museum survey, was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Comprehensive catalogs were published with both surveys. A focused presentation of Corse’s work was on view at Dia: Beacon in New York for four years highlighting historical works from the collection.

Mary Corse was also included in the major presentation Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A., Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2011. The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Dia Art Foundation, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery, Washington D.C.; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Long Museum, Shanghai; Amorepacfic Museum, Seoul; and other institutions.

PACE GALLERY LOS ANGELES

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.pacegallery.com

Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray @ Pace Gallery, London - "My Country" Exhibition in collaboration with D’Lan Contemporary

Emily Kam Kngwarray: My Country

Pace Gallery, London

June 6 - August 8, 2025

Alhalker Country is ours—so is the anwerlarr yam. I paint my plant, the one I am named after—those seeds I am named after. Kam is its name. Kam. I am named after the anwerlarr plant. I am Kam! -- Emily Kam Kngwarray [1]

Pace presents an exhibition of works by renowned Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, in collaboration with D’Lan Contemporary, at its London gallery. The show—titled My Country— coincides with Tate Modern’s major survey of Emily Kam Kngwarray, which will open in July. My Country traces Kngwarray’s artistic evolution from her early organic forms to her later vibrant, dot-filled color fields, culminating in the minimalist compositions that defined her mature work. To reflect her profound influence on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, as well as on women artists and the broader Australian art landscape, the exhibition will also include historical and contemporary batiks by artists inspired by Kngwarray’s pioneering practice.

Emily Kam Kngwarray (ca. 1914–96) is one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed contemporary artists. Her use of new art media began in the 1970s, when she was introduced to batik at Ankerrapw (Utopia Station homestead) in Australia’s Northern Territory. After developing a distinctive style with little external influence, she shifted from batik to acrylic on canvas in 1988, marking the start of an extraordinary eight-year painting career during which she is estimated to have created around 3,000 works.

An Elder of the Anmatyerr people and custodian of her ancestral Country, Alhalker, Emily Kam Kngwarray produced vivid, deeply personal works that express the ancestral and ecological relationships that continue to shape her land. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the term Country encompasses not only the physical terrain but also waters, skies, and all living beings, together with the cultural, spiritual, and familial responsibilities that connect them. Kngwarray’s practice was rooted in the Dreaming: a dynamic, lived worldview in which ancestral creation stories and laws animate the land, its people, and their connections. Her paintings do more than depict these forces; they embody them, giving visual form to the rhythms and energies of her Country.

The works on view at Pace, some of which have never been exhibited before, trace Kngwarray’s rapid stylistic and thematic evolution, illuminating the inseparable interior and exterior worlds that shaped her practice. Harmony of Spring (1990), included in the exhibition, exemplifies the immediate confidence of her early paintings, marked by linear compositions overlaid with fields of singular and concentric double dots. In this work, as in others from the same period, the underlying structure recalls the rhizomatic paths of the anwerlarr yam, along with its seed and seedpods—kam—from which Emily Kam Kngwarray takes her middle name. Nested within the dense interplay of lines and dots are arrow-like forms depicting the tracks left across the ground by emus. These paintings can be read as experiential maps, charting time—seasonal shifts and the life cycles of plants and animals—and space, encompassing the vast terrain of Alhalker and the networks of roots and foliage above and below the earth’s surface. Kngwarray’s paintings not only make her relationship with this living world tangible, but extend its presence, drawing work, viewer, and artist into an ongoing expression of cultural and ecological responsibility.

Between 1992 and 1993, Kngwarray’s paintings surge with stippled fields of dots that engulf the linear foundations of her earlier works. Her use of color is denser, structuring the compositions through vibrant, often unexpected flashes of contrast and harmony—as seen in Desert Storm (1992), included in the exhibition, where an effervescent patch of mossy greens and earthy reds rolls off the right edge of the canvas, returning to the meteorological energy it describes. Kngwarray’s shifting use of tools and techniques is evident throughout this transformative period: larger canvas stretchers and longer brushes allowed for an expanded gestural range, while trimmed brushes enabled her to manipulate the texture of each daub.

As a senior member of her community, Kngwarray played a central role in awely— women’s ceremonial traditions encompassing song, dance, and the painting of bodies with ground ochres. Often painting her canvases while seated, her mark-making is defined by a fluid expressiveness and an ease with materials that echoes the ritual movement and touch of ‘painting up’ for awely. The striped designs of these ceremonies translated into the astonishing, austere canvases of her final years. These works—often composed of minimal, webbed structures painted over dark backgrounds—combine an assured command of linear form and the picture plane with the gestural force that defines all of Kngwarray’s work, from paintings and batiks to the ancestral, familial contact of ochre onto skin.

Alongside a 1987 batik by Emily Kam Kngwarray, this exhibition also includes textile works by Judy Greenie Ngwarai, Audrey Morton Ngwarai, Ruby Morton Ngwarai, Annie Petyarre, and Lena Pula Pwerle. Together, these works demonstrate the enduring influence Kngwarray continues to have on generations of artists working in Australia today.

Emily Kam Kngwarray (b. ca. 1914, Alhalker, Utopia, Australia; 1996, Mparntwe/Alice Springs, Australia) began painting on silk and cotton fabric in the batik style alongside the women in her community, and, in 1977, became a founding member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. Introduced to canvas in 1988, Kngwarray’s practice shifted in part due to the adaptability of paint as a medium, which allowed her to create spontaneous, gestural marks using various implements. Kngwarray’s paintings are a continuation of the deep-rooted oral and visual traditions that inspired her batik work. When she was already in her seventies, her first painting, Emu Woman (1988–1989), debuted in the group exhibition, A Summer Project: Utopia Women's Paintings held at S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney (1989). Emily Kam Kngwarray was a prolific artist, executing an estimated three thousand paintings in an eight-year span. In 1997, she was represented posthumously at the 47th Venice Biennale. Her work is held in public collections worldwide including Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, Australia; Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and The Vatican Museums, Vatican City, among many others. In July 2025, Tate Modern, London, will open the first major survey of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s work in Europe. 

[1] Emily Kam Kngwarray quoted in Jennifer Green, “The life and legacy of Emily Kam Kngwarray” in Emily Kam Kngwarray, ed. Kelli Cole, Jennifer Green, and Hetti Perkins (National Gallery of Australia, 2023), 150.

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5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ

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Li Hei Di @ Pace Gallery, Hong Kong - "Tongues of Flare" Exhibition

Li Hei Di: Tongues of Flare

Pace Gallery, Hong Kong

May 29 – August 29, 2025

LI HEI DI 

Gapes at the vanity of toil, 2025

© Li Hei Di, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Pace presents Tongues of Flare, an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by LI HEI DI, at its Hong Kong gallery. This presentation marks Li’s first solo show with Pace since they joined the gallery’s program in 2024. Following its run at Pace in Hong Kong, Tongues of Flare will travel to the Pond Society during Shanghai Art Week in the fall.

Born in Shenyang, China in 1997, Li, who currently lives and works in London, is known for their explorations of human embodiment, displacement, and intimacy in luminous paintings that blend abstraction and figuration. In their vibrant, dreamlike canvases—where ghostly, translucent bodies and body parts pulsate in and out of view amid abstract forms and washes of color—Li embeds latent narratives about gender, repressed and fulfilled desire, and emotional fluidity for viewers to uncover and decipher. Primarily a painter, they also work across sculpture and performance, mediums that complement their otherworldly canvases.

Li’s work has figured in recent group exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield in the United Kingdom, The Warehouse in Dallas, Le Consortium in Dijon, France, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and Marquez Art Projects in Miami, as well as the 2023 X Museum Triennial in Beijing. They are represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio; the Hepworth Wakefield; the Long Museum in Shanghai; and the Yageo Foundation in Taiwan.

The artist’s exhibition at Pace in Hong Kong spotlights 11 new, never-before-exhibited paintings produced in 2025. Meditating on self-discovery and enactments of physical and spiritual transformation, these works imagine the body as an architecture of energies and feelings—a space where chaos, love, passion, and other phenomena converge and collide. These layered compositions, where spectral figures reveal and obscure themselves at different moments, speak to the complexities of selfhood and the conflicts between our internal selves and forces of the external world.

In this group of paintings, the most vulnerable and diaristic works that Li has created to date, the artist continues to use the natural world—in particular, movements and flows of water—as a metaphor for the evolutionary process of becoming one’s self. Wild abstractions rendered in saturated colors oscillate and undulate across their canvases with an oceanic rhythm, fluctuating with each motion of Li’s brush. As with their past bodies of work, they have also drawn inspiration from various literary sources—including Georges Bataille’s Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby—for their latest paintings. In these books—particularly in The Vegetarian, which tells the story of a woman who becomes increasingly convinced that she is turning into a plant—Li has uncovered new ideas about sexuality, monstrosity, and transfiguration that manifest in their new works. Each painting in this series can be understood as a seed for profound, liberating growth, revealing how change can emerge from the most hidden corners of the self.

A new wood sculpture by the artist is also on view in the exhibition. Depicting an abstracted body at repose within a cradle-like vessel, this work reflects the state of the physical body and the mind at night during sleep—sinking ever deeper into the shifting, unpredictable world of the unconscious. Presented together in Hong Kong, Li’s paintings and sculpture transport viewers to a realm where the boundaries between life and death, beauty and struggle, and imagination and reality are collapsed.

LI HEI DI (b. 1997, Shenyang, China) lives and works in London. The artist attended a one-year student exchange program in Ohio before studying at Idyllwild Arts in southern California. They received a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2020, and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2022. Their first one-artist exhibition was held at Linseed Projects, Shanghai (2022), followed by Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2023) and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2024). Recent group exhibitions including their work have been held at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong (2023); Centre of International Contemporary Art, Vancouver (2023); X Museum Triennial, Beijing (2023); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2024); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2024); GRIMM, New York (2024); and The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2025–2026). Their work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of

Art; and Yageo Foundation, Taipei, among others.

PACE HONG KONG

12/F, H Queen's, 80 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong

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Robert Indiana: The American Dream @ Pace, NYC

Robert Indiana: The American Dream

Pace Gallery, New York

Though August 15, 2025 

ROBERT INDIANA

Apogee, 1970 

© The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents Robert Indiana: The American Dream, a major exhibition including seminal examples of paintings and sculpture created by the artist beginning in the early 1960s and developed throughout subsequent decades of his artistic career, to be shown at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Examining Indiana’s critique of the duality of the American Dream—both its promise and its privations—this exhibition highlights the connections between the artist’s personal history and the social, political, and cultural realities of postwar America. Reflecting on the critical and political underpinnings of Indiana’s work, as well as his enduring impact as an artist, Pace’s presentation includes loans from several prominent institutions.

Pace’s exhibition in New York is accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing, which is shed light on Indiana’s lifelong artistic engagement with both the aspirations of the American dream and its dark underbelly–the repressed dimensions of American history and society, from colonialism to materialism and commodification. Among the works on view are the 1961 painting The Calumet, which features the names of Native American tribes, acknowledging the presence of Indigenous life and culture within the subconscious of America; The Black Marilyn (1967/1998), a painting that speaks to the commodification of celebrity and desire in American mass media in the 1960s; and the painted bronze sculpture The American Dream (1992/2015), bearing fundamental words of the human condition: “HUG,” “ERR,” “EAT,” and “DIE.”

Oliver Shultz, Chief Curator of Pace Gallery, says: “In many ways, Indiana is an artist whose work has been eclipsed by its own fame. This exhibition is about rediscovering the real Indiana, the radical and probing artist he really was. Both a pioneer and an outlier in the 1960s, the impact of his efforts to imbue formalist abstraction with content is difficult to overstate. Indiana’s work of the sixties reveals the true nature of the American dream as a dialectic: even as it uplifts, it also oppresses. Even as it offers the grandest of aspirations, it remains founded in a history of violence that lies embedded in language itself.”

Pace’s presentation also includes works from Indiana’s iconic LOVE series, recontextualizing this important and well-known image within his broader practice and tying this motif to other words and ideas—including “EAT” and “DIE”—that recur across his paintings and sculptures, symbols of both personal and universal significance in Indiana’s work.

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

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Robert Indiana: The American Dream

Pace Gallery, New York, May 9 – August 15, 2025

Robert Mangold: Pentagons and Folded Space @ Pace, New York - Part of Pace 65th anniversary year Exhibitions

Robert Mangold

Pentagons and Folded Space

Pace Gallery, New York

May 9 – August 15, 2025 

Pace presents a new body of work by Robert Mangold at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This exhibition—Pace’s fifteenth presentation dedicated to a new body of work by Mangold since 1991—spans the gallery’s second and seventh floors. It features paintings, including three multi-panel works, and works on paper created by the artist between 2022 and 2024.

This show is organized on the occasion of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions of work by major 20th century artists—with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships—at its spaces around the world. It is accompanied by a new catalogue, with an essay by Dieter Schwarz, from Pace Publishing, which has produced 16 books on each new body of Mangold’s work since his first exhibition with the gallery in 1992.

Mangold has been a key figure in painting since the 1960s. Exploring the fundamental elements of composition, he has created boundary-pushing geometric abstractions on shaped canvases that charted new frontiers within the medium. Robert Mangold is part of a legacy forged with other major figures of Conceptualism and Minimalism, including his close friends Sol LeWitt and Robert Ryman and his wife Sylvia Plimack Mangold.

The body of work that the artist will present in his upcoming exhibition features broad planes of color across canvases of diverse shapes and sizes, reflecting a continuing engagement with shape, line, and color—and the effect these elements can have on each other—that has defined his practice for over 60 years. As with his preceding series, Mangold’s new and recent works are part of a continuous evolution, elaborating upon the paintings and drawings he showed at Pace in New York in 2022 while also reaching back to his earliest experimentations with color and form, symmetry and asymmetry, and notions of wholeness and fragmentation. Several loans from private and public collections will figure in the exhibition, including Four Pentagons (2022). This four-panel painting, loaned by the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the largest works that Robert Mangold has produced in decades.

The multi-panel and individual canvases in the show speak to the artist’s enduring interest in the ways that line, color, and shape can give a painting a sense of extending into multiple dimensional planes. Meanwhile, the works on paper in this exhibition, all made in 2024, shed light on a crucial aspect of Mangold’s practice, offering a more intimate experience of his abstractions.

Throughout 2025, Pace is celebrating its anniversary year with 16 exhibitions of work by artists who have been central to its program for decades. Presented around the world, these exhibitions are odes to some of the gallery's longest-lasting relationships. Over the course of their careers, these figures, with Pace's support, charted new courses in the history of art. These special exhibitions are listed chronologically below:

Joel Shapiro — Tokyo, January

Louise Nevelson — New York, January; Seoul, April

Kenneth Noland — Seoul, January; Tokyo, March

Sam Gilliam — Seoul, January; Tokyo, March

Jean Dubuffet — New York, March; Berlin, May

Robert Indiana — Hong Kong, March; 

Robert Indiana: The American Dream  —New York, May

Robert Irwin — Los Angeles, April

Robert Mangold — New York, May

James Turrell — Seoul, June

Claes Oldenburg — Tokyo, July

Agnes Martin — New York, November

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