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

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Sophie Calle: Public Places - Private Spaces, The Jewish Museum San Francisco

SOPHIE CALLE: PUBLIC PLACES – PRIVATE SPACES

The Jewish Museum San Francisco

March 7 – June 28, 2001

The Jewish Museum San Francisco presents SOPHIE CALLE: PUBLIC PLACES – PRIVATE SPACES. The show includes an installation of photographs and texts by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle and select pieces of Calle’s work from Bay Area collections. This is Calle’s first museum show in San Francisco. 

Director Connie Wolf said, “It is very exciting to have an internationally acclaimed artist such as Sophie Calle at The Jewish Museum San Francisco. Her art is consistently engaging and the work in this exhibition perfectly reflects the Museum’s mission - to approach Jewish issues and make them relevant in a contemporary world.”

Sophie Calle’s installation was inspired by the Orthodox tradition of eruv (literally meaning blend). An eruv is a symbolic boundary made of wires, string or neutral barriers, erected in and around observant Jewish communities. The tradition is a practical response to the religious prohibition against carrying objects outside of one’s home on the Sabbath. By transforming the space within it from public to private, the eruv establishes a collective property through which one can move as within a house. Essentially, the eruv expands the boundaries of the home.

Inspired by the tradition of eruv, the artist journeyed to Israel in the mid 90’s to interview 14 inhabitants of Jerusalem - Israelis and Palestinians – and asked each person to take her to a public place in that city they considered private. The intimate stories reveal ordinary public places that simultaneously exist as private places, all which lie within the boundaries of the Jerusalem eruv. Fourteen photographs and texts document the stories of the Jerusalem residents and 20 photographs follow the series of electric poles, wood and wire which comprise the Jerusalem eruv. Neither the texts nor the photographs disclose the cultural identity of the interviewee, and not knowing who is Jewish or Palestinian is a poetic commentary.

Sophie Calle sets up a conceptual connection to the eruv by investigating how individuals, both Jewish and Arab, religious and secular, transform space and make it their own. Issues around land, boundaries and religious law are common considering the contested nature of Jerusalem, but Sophie Calle has managed to infuse these with a compassion that elicits intimate reflection.

The stories and the accompanying photographs are both politically and personally charged: a photograph of a wall symbolizing the separation between people, a bench on which an admirer kept vigil and contemplated a love during the Six Day War, a street where a little girl was hit by a bus. The texts construct and inform the photographs and are simple and poignant. Reflecting on the bus accident the woman says “It’s been many years but I drive along here almost every day and I can’t help remembering everything. In a strange way I consider that piece of street mine. Part of my body remains there.”

Recently, the eruv tradition has been a controversial and political issue. Last year communities such as Palo Alto, California and Tenafly, New Jersey, battled in the courts over the legality of religious boundaries and have grappled with the issue of public v. private space. These recent eruv controversies that have erupted across the United States and been local news headliners, make this exhibition incredibly topical and important. For the past twenty years Calle has investigated private lives and made aspects of them public through her work. To allow for a more complete understanding of these issues in Calle’s oeuvre, the show includes selections of her work from Bay Area collections. Included are two pieces from The Sleepers (1979), a series where the artist invited others to sleep in her bed while she documented the various activities every hour on the hour. For eight straight days different people inhabited her bed and the photographs and texts of the event testify to her emerging interest in the voyeuristic aspects of photography. Also on view are two pieces from The Blind (1986), a series where Sophie Calle continued her atypical approach to photography by asking several people who had been born without sight to describe their image of beauty. She then photographed what the participants described. Several works from the Les Tombes (1990) and Autobiographical Stories (1992) series are also on view in this portion of the exhibition.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

Sophie Calle is one of France’s best known Conceptual artists. Born in 1953 and currently living in Paris, Calle has received wide acclaim in the U.S. for her collaboration with writer Paul Auster, which resulted in her piece Double Game and the publication of a book with the same title. Her last museum show in the Bay Area, Sophie Calle MATRIX/Berkeley 133, was curated by Larry Rinder and was held at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum in 1990. Recently she had exhibitions at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, the Camden Arts Center in London, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the show The Museum as Muse.

SOPHIE CALLE: PUBLIC PLACES – PRIVATE SPACES was organized by The Jewish Museum San Francisco, with assistance by Natasha Boas Ph.D. The installation eruv is on loan from the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris.

THE JEWISH MUSEUM SAN FRANCISCO

121 Steuart Street (between Mission and Howard Streets), San Francisco

www.jewishmuseumsf.org