Agnes Martin @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'Innocent Love' Exhibition

Agnes Martin: Innocent Love

Pace Gallery, New York

November 7 – December 20, 2025

Pace presents an exhibition of paintings from Agnes Martin’s Innocent Love series at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This is the final show organized as part of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, celebrating an artist who has been integral to the gallery for much of its history. The presentation features 12 canvases created by Agnes Martin in the later years of her life—between the late 1990s and early 2000s—in which she took up new experimentations with the phenomenological possibilities of color to express the unbridled imagination of childhood. This exhibition is accompanied by a new collection of Martin’s writings from Pace Publishing.

One of the most influential artists of the 20th century and a progenitor of Minimalism, Agnes Martin pursued a vision of pure truth and beauty through her practice. Using mathematical calculations, she forged meticulous abstract compositions in intricate grids and bands of alternating colors. She spent much of her life in New Mexico, maintaining an ascetic, largely solitary existence for many years—these circumstances allowed her to fully immerse in philosophies of Zen Buddhism that had animated her practice from its outset and in explorations of space, form, and metaphysics. Dedicating her life and work to articulating transcendence through seemingly simple forms, Agnes Martin once wrote that “artwork comes straight through a free mind—an open mind.”

Pace, which began representing Agnes Martin in 1974, has mounted nearly 30 presentations of her work since. The gallery’s exhibition of Martin’s Innocent Love paintings sheds new light on the most important series she produced in the last decade of her life. Guided by her enduring belief that beauty resides deep within the self, she set out, in the late 1990s, to make a group of works that celebrate the freedom of a child’s mind. The sense of energy and purpose that motivated her to create her Innocent Love paintings is reflected in the works’ bright colors and their looser, more syncopated geometries. These were also the first works she titled since the mid-1980s, bearing names like Tranquility, Gratitude, Blessings, and I Love Love. This group of radiant canvases reflects Martin’s intense, lifelong interest in the spiritual essence of painting and her conviction that beauty is untethered to any single subject or meaning.

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912, Agnes Martin studied painting at the University of New Mexico between 1946 and 1948. In the early 1950s—when she established herself in the New York art world—she earned a master’s degree from the Teachers College at Columbia University, where she engaged with Buddhist thought through lectures by writer Jiddu Krishnamurti and Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki. During this time, she lived in the city’s storied Coenties Slip and associated with fellow artists like Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ad Reinhardt, presenting her first solo exhibition in the city with Betty Parsons Gallery in 1958. Her career accelerated in the 1960s, when she was included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as a seminal exhibition of minimalist art co-organized by Robert Smithson and Virginia Dwan at Dwan Gallery.

After a hiatus from painting—and the limelight of New York—that Agnes Martin initiated in 1967, she had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. The show, titled On a Clear Day, featured 30 screen prints based on drawings produced in 1972. It was during the 1970s that Martin began her decades-long friendship with Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher, who visited the artist in New Mexico before mounting her first show with the gallery in 1975—a presentation of new paintings with horizontal and vertical bands of pastel pink and blue. In the following decades, up until her death in 2004, Agnes Martin would continue explorations of this kind, using acrylic, watercolor, and graphite to investigate the sensorial possibilities of line and color and to express absolute truth through pure abstraction.

ARTIST AGNES MARTIN

Agnes Martin (b. 1912, Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada; d. 2004, Taos, New Mexico), one of the most influential painters of her generation, left an indelible mark on the history of modern and contemporary art. Growing up in western Canada, she moved between New Mexico and New York throughout her early career. For a pivotal decade starting in 1957, Agnes Martin lived and worked in Coenties Slip, a neighborhood in lower Manhattan she shared with emerging artists including Ellsworth Kelly, before returning to New Mexico in 1968. Inspired by the transcendent qualities of paintings by Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, Martin considered herself to be an Abstract Expressionist. Nonetheless, her oeuvre played a critical role in heralding the advent of Minimalism, influencing, among others, Eva Hesse’s sculptural practice and Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. Characterized by austere lines and grids superimposed upon muted grounds of color, Martin’s paintings elegantly negotiate the confines of structure and space, draftsmanship, and the metaphysical.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York, NY

www.pacegallery.com

Stephan Balkenhol @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Stephan Balkenhol

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

August 22 – September 21, 2025

The minimalist sculptures of German artist Stephan Balkenhol radiate a quiet, archaic power. Though his figures often assume formal poses and wear expressionless faces, they are anything but detached. Instead, they convey a restrained yet compelling intensity. Balkenhol’s primary focus is the human condition—whether his subjects are actual people or animals dressed in human clothing, they serve as reflections of humanity. He deliberately preserves the visible marks of his carving tools, giving each figure a tactile roughness that underscores its vulnerability. Sculpted from a single block of wood—typically soft poplar or Douglas fir—each work embraces natural cracks and coarse textures, foregrounding the imperfections that define what it means to be human.

Stephan Balkenhol is widely recognized as one of today’s foremost contemporary sculptors. In the early 1980s, he broke away from the dominant abstract and conceptual art movements of the time, turning instead toward figurative expression. Since then, the human form—and the existential questions it evokes—has remained central to his practice. While clearly representational, Balkenhol’s works resist literal interpretation, inviting viewers into open-ended encounters.

Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957) studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg and has served as a professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste in Karlsruhe since 1992. His sculptures are held in major international collections, including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Karlsruhe, Kassel, and Berlin, as well as in Meisenthal, France.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

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

Beginner Ceramics, a Brooklyn-based ceramics studio founded by Jesse Hamerman @ Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York - "The Possibilities Are Endless" Exhibition

Beginner Ceramics

The Possibilities Are Endless

Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

March 21 - April 26, 2025

Rachel Uffner Gallery presents The Possibilities Are Endless, a solo exhibition by Beginner Ceramics, a Brooklyn-based ceramics studio founded by Jesse Hamerman. The show features a striking range of hand-built sculptural objects ranging from vases to mirrors to lamps. Infused with bold colors, dynamic textures, and playful geometries, the pieces embrace traditional notions of functionality while exploring the tactile, expressive possibilities of clay. 

Jesse Hamerman founded Beginner Ceramics in 2021, rekindling a passion for clay that had lain dormant since college. After spending 22 years collaborating with artists to fabricate ambitious, large-scale works in a variety of media, Jesse Hamerman returned to ceramics with a deep well of technical knowledge and an open mind. "Exploring form with the mind of a beginner and creating with joy is the goal with every object," says Jesse Hamerman, reflecting on the ethos of the studio. 

Beginner Ceramics’ objects are rooted in minimalism and geometric abstraction, evident in the rhythmic linear handles that frame the vessels and the gestural swatches of color that dance across their surfaces. All of the studio’s objects are iterations on a similar formal theme, in the vein of Sol Lewitt, Fred Sandback, and other minimalists. This interplay between structure and spontaneity creates a dynamic tension, where the precise, symmetrical forms contrast with the painterly energy of the surface treatments.

The works in the show also radiate an undeniable sense of playfulness. Glazed in an exuberant spectrum of hues – electric blues, soft pastels, vibrant yellows, and earthy neutrals – each piece carries a distinct character, heightened by the vibrant, hand-painted walls. Looped handles, layered ridges, and the interplay of glossy and matte surfaces evoke movement and energy, creating a dynamic environment for the appreciation of craftsmanship.

The Possibilities Are Endless offers an opportunity to experience Beginner Ceramics’ work in an immersive setting, where form and function blur, and everyday objects become sculptural statements.

RACHEL UFFNER GALLERY

170 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002

racheluffnergallery.com

Minoru Niizuma @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - Waterfall in Autumn Wind

Minoru Niizuma

Waterfall in Autumn Wind

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

November 10 — December 10, 2022

Minoru Niizuma

Windy Wind, 1969

Portuguese black granite, 120 x 22.2 x 28.6 cm

Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Tina Kim Gallery

Photo by Dario Lasagni

Tina Kim Gallery presents its first exhibition dedicated to the practice of Japanese-American sculptor and educator MINORU NIIZUMA (b. 1930, Tokyo; d. 1998, New York). Recognized for his abstract marble sculptures in the postwar period, Minoru Niizuma exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and was an active organizer of public sculpture exhibitions across both continents. Although a lifelong artist and educator whose works entered multiple institutional and private collections, Minoru Niizuma’s legacy has rarely been acknowledged since his passing at the age of 67, in part due to a lack of formal representation. Marking the first attempt to introduce a deeper understanding of the artist’s practice, the exhibition brings together works from two key decades of his practice—the 1970s and 80s. In addition, on view are a range of rare archival material that contextualizes his efforts to promote broader cross-cultural understandings between the US, Europe, and Japan through his stone-carving symposiums, exhibitions, and public sculpture parks. Accompanying this exhibition will also be an illustrated exhibition catalog, featuring an extended introduction of the artist written by art historian and curator Reiko Tomii.

Born in Tokyo in 1930 and educated at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Minoru Niizuma immigrated to New York in 1959 and joined the Brooklyn Museum Art School as an instructor in 1964. Upon establishing his studio practice in New York, Minoru Niizuma attained the space needed to develop larger-scale sculptures; soon after, his work was included in both the 1966 and 1968 Whitney Annuals, as well as a landmark survey of Japanese Art that traveled through five institutions across the US, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Throughout his life, Minoru Niizuma worked in series, focusing on refining and iterating a single form over the course of several years.

Although affiliated with the emerging artistic cluster that came to become known as “Minimalism,” Minoru Niizuma’s artistic development remained intrinsically indebted to the properties of his oft-chosen mediums: marble and granite. Beginning from the 1970s and 80s onwards, Minoru Niizuma increasingly chose to execute his works in ways that revealed—rather than obviated—the natural appearance of stone, reacting against the prevailing emphasis on industrial material and processes dominating sculptural practice during that time. In contrast with his earlier work from the 1960s, which are often characterized by highly polished surfaces and geometric forms, the works included in the exhibition bear evidence of the artist’s intention to restrain his own hand. As exemplified by works such as Windy Wind (c.1970s), the surfaces of the sculptures are marked by grooves, crags, and furrows. Yet, the rough-hewn appearance of Minoru Niizuma’s works is contrasted with the organic, fluid forms that the artist employed. Harboring a love of mountain climbing, many of the forms of Minoru Niizuma’s sculptures are inspired by his own encounters with natural environments, which he alludes to in the title of each respective work.

Apart from key works, the exhibition also includes select archival material that contextualizes Minoru Niizuma’s efforts to promote artistic exchange during these key decades. Minoru Niizuma established significant relationships with artists and art professionals, including Isamu Noguchi, George Segal, and Yoko Ono, amongst others. In addition, he played an integral role in organizing exhibitions that introduced Japanese sculptors to New York in various venues, including the Sculpture Center. Earlier in 1971, Minoru Niizuma had also organized a symposium of stone sculpture in New York City, commissioning new works from artists and displaying them in outdoor, public sites across the city. Over the course of the next two decades, Minoru Niizuma would go on to organize and participate in multiple “stone symposiums” across various locations including Vermont, Portugal, Ireland, and Austria. Often, he and other participants would draw on the local marble and granite quarries to create new works that were then exhibited to the public. In the 1980s, Minoru Niizuma began traveling to Portugal extensively because of the immense array of marble and stone available, eventually resulting in a partnership with Portuguese President Mario Soares to build artistic exchange between Portugal and Japan. Today, many of Minoru Niizuma’s large-scale public sculptures can still be seen throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. They reflect his own artistic development but also stand as a testament to his passion for promoting stone carving across these continents.

Arata Niizuma and the Estate of Minoru Niizuma collaborated on this exhibition.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.tinakimgallery.com

Helen Pashgian @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - Spheres and Lenses

Helen Pashgian: Spheres and Lenses 

Lehmann Maupin, New York 

November 4, 2021 – January 8, 2022 

Lehmann Maupin presents Spheres and Lenses, artist HELEN PASHGIAN’s first solo exhibition in New York since 1971 and her first with Lehmann Maupin in the United States. This exhibition features a series of new lens and sphere sculptures, expanding on the bodies of work for which she is best known. Born in Pasadena, Helen Pashgian is widely recognized as a pioneer and leading member of the 1960s Light and Space movement in Southern California, which explored Minimalism with a close eye toward the interaction between light and space. Over the course of her career, Helen Pashgian has produced an extensive oeuvre of innovative sculptures―vibrantly colored columns, discs, and spheres―that engage light, color, and form in wholly unique ways. Often featuring an isolated minimal shape that appears suspended, embedded, or encased within, these works are characterized by their semi-translucent surfaces that somehow both redirect and contain illumination. In Spheres and Lenses, Helen Pashgian focuses on two bodies of work—spheres and lenses—carefully experimenting with scale, from the intimate (6 inch spheres) to the immense (60 inch lens). 

Using an innovative application of industrial epoxies, plastics, and resins to create her ethereal surfaces, Helen Pashgian refers to her sculptures as “presences” in space that viewers must circumnavigate to fully experience. Every vantage point invites an observation of change—of color and light shifting, internal objects appearing and receding—a phenomenon of visual curiosity and pleasure. During the 1960s Helen Pashgian created her first sphere-like sculptures that inspired her career-long investigation of how light changes as it passes through a translucent object. Since these early egg-shaped epoxy resin experiments, Helen Pashgian has created an expansive series of brightly colored monochrome and multicolored spheres that contain a suspended element. These embedded “objects” challenge our understanding and assumptions around perception, causing the brain to question what the eye is seeing. As light enters each sculpture, distortions, illusions, refractions, and rainbows occur—a result of the interplay between the light, reflective surfaces, and cast forms inside. Helen Pashgian’s carefully researched choice of color plays a critical role in these effects, as each color reflects and refracts light in dramatically different ways. 

Trained as an art historian with a focus on Dutch Golden Age painting, Helen Pashigan was inspired by the many landscapes that depict a cool natural light similar to that of Southern California and the calm and composed interiors of Johannes Vermeer, who masterfully rendered light that appeared to emanate from a single source. These paintings continue to inform Helen Pashgian’s fundamental interest in making objects that engage with and expand our understanding of the effects and perception of light. During the late 1960s and early 1970s Helen Pashgian created a series of circular, disc-like works that she refers to as lenses. These works, both technically and aesthetically challenging, appear as discs of color floating in space, creating the illusion that the sculpture is both floating in front of and simultaneously receding into the wall behind it—an effect similar to watching the sunset on the horizon. The works in this series, which appear to hover just between materiality and immateriality, becoming and dissolving, most clearly illustrate Helen Pashgian's ability to engage light as a material that alters, changes, and seemingly dematerializes an object. Helen Pashgian began to revisit this series in 2010s, and is now pushing the scale and visual immateriality of these works to their limit, creating seductive optical effects that transfix the viewer. For this exhibition she has created a colossal lens that reaches 60 inches in diameter, the first presentation of a disc of this size in New York since the initial inception of the series in the 1960s. 

While Helen Pashgian has long gravitated towards experimenting with non-traditional materials, her primary concern has always been to maintain light as the object and subject of her work. In her most recent work, she draws viewers in by creating a range of ethereal, visual experiences through her unique ability to manipulate scale, color, materiality, and light. For Helen Pashgian, light is not simply a metaphor, symbol, or allegory; light itself is both the medium and the message. In addition to her presentation at Lehmann Maupin New York, Helen Pashigan have a major solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, NM, and is featured in a major survey exhibition of Light and Space opening at Copenhagen Contemporary, both opening in November 2021. Coinciding with this exhibition, the artist published Helen Pashgian: Spheres and Lenses with Radius Books in Spring/Summer 2021, with a major monograph forthcoming in 2022. 

HELEN PASHGIAN received her BA from Pomona College, Claremont, CA in 1956 and an MA from Boston University, Boston, MA in 1958. She also attended Columbia University, New York, NY from 1956 to 1957. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (2020, forthcoming); Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, and Hong Kong (2019); Vito Schnabel Projects, St. Moritz, Switzerland (2019); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2014); Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2010); and Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA (2007). Select group exhibitions featuring her work include Crystals in Art: Ancient to Today, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK (2019); Radiant Light and Expanded Space, Pearl Lam, Hong Kong, China (2019); Space Shifters, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2018); Water & Light, Ochi Gallery and Emily Friedman Fine Art, Ketchum, ID (2018); Made in California, Mana Wynwood, Miami, FL (2015); California Dreamin’: Thirty Years of Collecting, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA (2014); Beyond Brancusi: The Space of Sculpture, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA (2013); Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2011), travelled to Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA (2011) and MartinGropiusBau, Berlin, Germany (2012); Translucence: Southern California Art From the 1960s and 1970s, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA (2006); and The Senses: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2006).

Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections internationally, including the Andrew Dickson White Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Bank of America, Los Angeles, CA; Bank of America, Singapore; Frederick Weisman Collection, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA.

LEHMANN MAUPIN

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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Bob Law @ Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples - In association with Richard Saltoun

Bob Law

in association with Richard Saltoun

Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples

Through 18 December, 2021

“I have, or I think I have, my perfect work in my mind’s eye. To bring that work into reality or existence is another matter - there is always some small flaw. Some improvement to be made. And it is this seeking after quality that most interests me... The work becomes a very serious trial and examination process in which the artist is solely responsible to himself for the quality and conviction of the work. The justification of the work is in the endeavour of the artist to seek out the quality and skill within his own mind and correlate his inner spirit with the art he can touch and make.” - Bob Law, July 1977

"We met [Bob Law] in, I think, 1974. Most of his paintings were painted in dark ink: blue, dark rust, or violet. A single colour covered the whole surface ... These were very allusive paintings, severe but not sad. Here was a strange limitless night, two contradictory aspects since one should have excluded the other. The sense of emptiness seemed to cohabit with tranquil serenity." from Giuseppe Panza: Memories of a Collector, 2007.

For the first time in Naples, Thomas Dane Gallery presents a solo exhibition of the pioneering artist BOB LAW (1934-2004). Comprising works from 1950s – 2000s, this survey show a critical overview of Bob Law’s expansive career, and features key examples from his major bodies of work, including Field Drawings, Chairs, Castles, and the Black Paintings.

Considered amongst the founders of British Minimalism, Bob Law's work defies easy categorisation and ranges across drawing, painting and sculpture and retains a firm yet always uneasy embrace of pure abstraction. As opposed to the New York-based minimalist artists, Bob Law's practice drew on his engagement with the English landscape and his esoteric range of interests.

Championed by the critic Lawrence Alloway, whom he met while in Cornwall, Bob Law exhibited with Peter Hobbs in Two Young British Painters at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1960). There followed one-man shows at some of the most prestigious galleries across Europe, including Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf, Germany (1970) and the increasingly influential Lisson Gallery, London, UK (1971). Major institutional solo exhibitions include 10 Black Paintings 1965-70, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK (1974); Bob Law: Paintings and Drawings 1959-1978, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, curated by Nicholas Serota (1978); and Bob Law: Drawings, Sculpture and Paintings, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall, UK, which travelled to Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, UK (1999). Recent group exhibitions include Assorted Paper, The Sunday Painter, London, UK (2017); Artists and Poets, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2015); Abstract Drawing, curated by Richard Deacon, Drawing Room, London, UK (2014); A House of Leaves, curated by Vincent Honoré, at DRAF, London, UK (2013). His work is included in numerous private and public collections throughout the world, including Tate, London, UK; the British Museum, London, UK; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; and the Panza Collection, Varese, Italy, amongst others.

THOMAS DANE GALLERY

Via Francesco Crispi, 69, 80122 Napoli

www.thomasdanegallery.com

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Robert Mangold @ Pace Gallery, London - A Survey 1981–2008

Robert Mangold: A Survey 1981–2008 

Pace Gallery, London 

Through May 22, 2021 

Pace Gallery presents an exhibition of Robert Mangold, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in London. Robert Mangold: A Survey 1981–2008—the artist’s first solo show in the UK in 12 years—features significant paintings spanning three decades, tracing pictorial developments by one of the most significant artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Showcasing Robert Mangold’s lifelong balancing of shape, line, and color, the paintings on view epitomize the conceptual and aesthetic rigor of his six-decade career, while also demonstrating an enduring will to challenge definitions of painting. Spanning nearly 30 years of work, this survey of Robert Mangold’s mid-career allows viewers to identify themes as they develop, finding prescience in the earlier works. The exhibition has been greatly enhanced by the inclusion of several paintings from the private collection of the late Dr. Walter de Logi, a long-time collector and champion of Robert Mangold’s work. 

In the 1960s Robert Mangold emerged as one of the most original and incisive voices shaping the discourse on painting in America. From the outset, Robert Mangold’s works explored the most elemental components of his art form, in doing so examining the very nature of painting. Integral to Robert Mangold’s thinking has always been a questioning of the primacy of the rectangular format. Beginning with the Walls and Areas of the mid-sixties, and right on through to today, Robert Mangold’s engagement with shaped canvases has allowed him to push his work beyond the conventions of traditional painting.

Bringing together vibrant but subtle color combinations, hand-drawn lines, and an innovative use of form, Robert Mangold’s ‘x’ or ‘+’ paintings, such as X Within X (Red-Orange) (1981) and Aqua/Green/Orange + Painting (1983), exist somewhere between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional; these works simultaneously insist on the ‘flatness’ of painting as well as its objecthood. Robert Mangold’s works always emphasize the relationship between the canvas and the wall and with the ‘x’ and ‘+’ paintings that relationship becomes even more apparent. These ideas are expanded in paintings such as Green Ellipse/Gray Frame (1989) in which Robert Mangold juxtaposes the active painted surface with the lines created by the unusual configuration of the diptych. Further, in Column Structure works of 2006, Robert Mangold continues to take a sculptural approach to his painting by joining multiple panels and tying them together with the elegant curl of a pencil line. 

Joining panels to create expansive canvases recurs throughout Robert Mangold’s practice. Curved Plane/Figure VIII, Study (1995) and Red/White Zone Painting II (1996) are each made up of three panels with a curved top edge. In the latter, Robert Mangold paints over the canvas joins to create an incongruity between the painted image and the structure of the support. Robert Mangold further subverts expectations by drawing sweeping intersecting ellipses over the textured red panels. The ovals perfectly align but are separated by the painting’s central white panel. In this way, Robert Mangold explores ideas of perception and narrative by forcing the viewer to ‘complete’ the work by mentally connecting the lines.

In its evolution, Robert Mangold’s work never becomes predictably linear or dogmatic. Rather, it remains open to the surprising twists and turns of his intuition and curiosity, often referring to his earlier works and re-examining previously raised questions. Ring Image C (2008), with its turquoise surface and elegantly undulating lines, is yet a step further in Robert Mangold’s exploration of shaped canvases. Like his ‘x’ and ‘+’ paintings, Robert Mangold plays with positive and negative space: the painting itself surrounds the void inherent to the ring form, incorporating the wall into the work. For Robert Mangold, the Ring series is a way of ‘setting up problems for the viewer’, he is asking ‘how do you visually deal with a ring when what’s usually in the center of a painting is very important?’ In other words, Robert Mangold is interested in finding ways to confound expectations and in doing so encourages viewers to engage with his paintings in new ways.

ROBERT MANGOLD (b. 1937, North Tonawanda, New York) has, since the 1950s, explored line and colour on supports ranging in shape, size, and dimension. Committed to abstraction as a means of communication, he has worked within a consistent geometric vocabulary to produce a varied body of paintings and works on paper. His career has developed through an evolution of techniques for the application of paint onto his chosen surface—first plywood and Masonite, and later, beginning in 1968, stretched canvas. Moving away from the conventions of paintings, he introduced shaped canvases, working with symmetrical and asymmetrical forms as well as curvilinear edges. For his early shaped and multi-panel constructions, Robert Mangold airbrushed oil-based pigments in gradations of colour, and later used a roller before ultimately adopting a brush to apply acrylic in subtle hues that near transparency. He remained intrigued by colour as much as structure, and his relationship with it shifted throughout the decades. His initial palette, inspired by industrial objects—file cabinets, brick walls, and trucks—transitioned toward colours that evoke mood: warm ochres, light blues, deep oranges, olive greens, and other hues. Robert Mangold’s mostly monochromatic compositions show an attention to gesture with the addition of hand-drawn pencil lines that curve across the planes of colour. 

Robert Mangold’s European exhibitions include Robert Mangold: Paintings 1964–1982, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, October 21–December 12, 1982 and Robert Mangold: Paintings: 1964–1987, at the Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, May 2–October 31, 1987. These shows were followed by the retrospective Robert Mangold: Painting as Wall, Werke von 1964 bis 1993, presented at Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in 1993, before travelling to RENN Espace d’Art Contemporain, Paris, November 27, 1993–June 26, 1994; Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Muenster, February 12–April 12, 1995; andCulturgest C.G.D., Lisbon, Portugal, September 15–October 22, 1995. Additionally, Robert Mangold: Paintings and Drawings 1984–1997 was presented at Museum Wiesbaden, October 18, 1998–February 21, 1999, travelling to Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland, June 16–August 22, 1999. More recently, Robert Mangold/Gaugin was presented at Musée d’Orsay, Paris, May 30–September 3, 2006 and Robert Mangold X, Plus and Frame Paintings was presented at Parasol Unit, London, UK, February 24–May 8, 2009.

PACE GALLERY

6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S 3ET

www.pacegallery.com

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Andrzej Urbanski @ Everard Read London - AB02 833/387/18

Andrzej Urbanski - AB02 833/387/18

Everard Read London

23 February - 16 March 2018

Everard Read London presents a solo exhibition of new works by Cape Town-based artist, ANDRZEJ URBANSKI, known for his meticulous, hard-edged abstraction.

Andrzej Urbanski's work appears to be the result of an automated process; the precision of its execution gives the impression that it is generated by a detached, robotic or digital tool. His interest in creating this illusion is rooted in his fascination with digitally-produced art, the digital tools he uses in plotting his intricate compositions, the relationship between lived experience and virtual reality and the status assigned to handmade products in the post-industrial era.

It is also informed by his appreciation for the minimalist movement, although he is inspired by a range of high modernists from Rothko to Piet Mondrian.

The bold shards of colour characterising his art may recall objects, places, experiences from his youth, the colour of a building or a room, or they may encompass his state of mind as he steps into his studio. As such, his painted works are described as ‘high’ or ‘low frequency’, referring to either a complex matrix of influences shaping intricate compositions, or quieter, ‘less busy’ forms, often united by a subdued colour palette.

EVERARD READ LONDON

80 Fulham Road, London SW3 6HR

www.everardlondon.com

Carl Andre at Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC - Lament for the Children

Carl Andre
Lament for the Children
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
February 20 - April 3, 2004

Lament for the Children consists of one hundred concrete blocks standing vertically in rows of ten at the intersections of a grid. The sculpture was originally created and exhibited in the abandoned playground at P.S.1 in 1976, for the Contemporary Art Center’s inaugural show, ‘Rooms’. The grid formation of the piece was derived from the interval between the joints in the paving of the playground. Lament for the Children was subsequently destroyed and remade in 1996 for an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany. This exhibition marks the first time the piece has been shown in New York since its creation in 1976.

Possessing a somber presence, the piece bears a visual resemblance to a field of gravestones, or an army of sentinels in grid formation. Besides relating to the piece’s original location in a children’s playground, the title Lament for the Children refers to a seventeenth-century Scottish dirge about the death of five children by fire. The tune, composed for the bagpipe by Patrick Mor MacCrimmon, has been described as the greatest single line melody in European music, and Andre’s reference to it suggests his admiration for traditional and classical culture. This is Carl Andre’s second use of the title: in 1965, he composed the three-page poem 144 Times, which bore the parenthetical title Lament for the Children.

Carl Andre was born September 16, 1935, in Quincy, Massachusetts. From 1951 to 1953, he attended the Phillips Academy, Andover, with Frank Stella and Hollis Frampton (with whom he shared a lasting interest in poetry). In 1957, he settled in New York and shortly thereafter began to create wood sculptures influenced by Brancusi. He progressively moved on to the use of sets of identical elements, and to materials such as granite, limestone, steel, lead and copper. His sculptures, often floor pieces, tend to depart from the traditional principles of sculpture such as verticality and monumentality.

Carl Andre’s first one-person show was held in 1965 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and the following year his work was included in Kynaston McShine’s and Lucy Lippard’s seminal exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum. He was, with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt, one of the leading artists of the 1960s, often associated with Minimalism. In the 1970s, the artist created large installations, such as 144 Blocks and Stones (1973) for the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Oregon, and outdoor works such as Stone Field Sculpture (1977) in downtown Hartford, Conn.

Carl Andre’s work has been the subject of several retrospectives, most notably at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, in 1978; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1978; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1987; the Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld and the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997. He lives in New York.

Paula Cooper Gallery

534 West 21st Street, New York
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Dan Flavin at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles - A Tribute Exhibition

Dan Flavin: A Tribute 

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

18 January – 22 February 1997

Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of work by DAN FLAVIN (1933 - 1996). The exhibition has been organized in tribute to the artist, who died in December 1996, and includes signature works dating from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Dan Flavin’s ground-breaking work used commercial fluorescent lights to create environments exploring light, color and space. Included in the exhibition is an example from Dan Flavin’s seminal 1960s body of work, Monuments to V. Tatlin, which paid homage to Vladimir Tatlin, the turn of the century avant-garde Soviet artist and architect. In addition, the exhibition features other important works from the 1960s through the 1980s, including a 1987 work created in honor of Donald Judd.

Dan Flavin: A Tribute marks the third exhibition of Flavin’s work at Margo Leavin Gallery.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069