Nadia Kaabi-Linke @ Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami - "We Didn’t Know We’re Ready" Exhibition

Nadia Kaabi-Linke

We Didn’t Know We’re Ready

Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami

Through August 30, 2025

Nadia Kaabi-Linke

Fatima, 2010

© Nadia Kaabi-Linke, courtesy of Piero Atchugarry Gallery

Piero Atchugarry Gallery presents We Didn’t Know W'e’re Ready by Tunisian artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke curated by Silvia Cirelli. The expressive journey of Kaabi-Linke delves into the complexities of human nature revealing an “architecture of pain” marked interdependent power dynamics and the struggles of mankind's vulnerability. Her work shows how people are affected by power, memory, and vulnerability. Memory is central to her work — it's the starting point for telling both personal and collective stories. Her artworks act like emotional records, helping us understand hidden parts of our culture today.

The title chosen for Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Miami debut solo exhibition goes exactly in this direction, it is an invitation to encompass time fluidity, to better understand the evolutionary codes of our living. We Didn’t Know We’re Ready, deliberately embraces a grammatical slip, blending verb tenses to highlight the constant convergence of yesterday and today. This temporal dissonance becomes a conceptual tool, a transversal narrative that invites a comprehensive reading, where each artwork acts as an emotional archive, a mosaic of confessions that reflects and translates the codes of contemporary culture. It is on this metaphorical bridge between past and present that the artist projects her own cultural space.

The complex relationship between artistic research and historical testimony unfolds through the evocative installation Blindstrom for Kazimir, inspired by Kazimir Malevich, a Ukrainian artist often wrongly labeled as Russian. Like many Ukrainian artists, Malevich suffered censorship. Nadia Kaabi-Linke honors these artists with black panels that represent missing or destroyed paintings, showing the damage caused by political violence. Cracks in the panels resemble wounds, revealing a deep sense of loss.

Another work, No One Harms Me Unpunished (2012), is based on a Scottish legend. A Viking raid was stopped when a warrior stepped on a thistle and cried out in pain, warning the locals. The thistle became a symbol of resistance. Nadia Kaabi-Linke places real thistles on a mattress frame, symbolizing the pain and abuse that are often hidden in everyday life, especially in intimate spaces.

In Protected Area (2025), a bench covered with sharp bird spikes makes it impossible to sit. What’s usually a place to rest becomes unwelcoming. This sculpture speaks about how public spaces are becoming more exclusive and less inviting, highlighting issues of social exclusion.

Tackling issues related to geopolitics, migration, identities and violence, Nadia Kaabi-Linke captures the collective memory and offers it to the viewer, urging them to share and participate in the emotion. An emotion that exposes a silent suffering. “The invisible violence, present or past, is active even if we don’t see it or decide to look away from it,” she states, “but like the unconscious, sooner or later the covered truth will come up to the surface and be acted out while controlling us simultaneously.”

Nadia Kaabi-Linke Portrait, 2020

Courtesy of Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami

NADIA KAABI-LINKE (b. 1978, Tunis) is a multimedia conceptual artist based in Berlin. After graduating with an MA from the Tunis School of Fine Arts, she received a PhD from the Pantheon Sorbonne in Paris. Growing up between Tunis, Kyiv, and Dubai, her personal history developed through the migration across cultures and borders that greatly influenced her artistic practice. Her work gives physical presence to that which tends to remain invisible in contemporary societies, be it people, structures, or the geopolitical forces that shape them. In a visually powerful way, she straddles beauty and violence, refinement and brutality, as well as the sublime and the vulgar, engaging the viewer in the play of conflicting forces of fear and attraction, repulsion and desire.

PIERO ATCHUGARRY GALLERY, MIAMI

5520 NE 4th Avenue, Miami, FL 33137

pieroatchugarry.com

Nadia Kaabi-Linke: We Didn’t Know We’re Ready

Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami, June 14 - August 30, 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

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com