Eija-Liisa Ahtila @ Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris - "On Breathing" Exhibition

Eija-Liisa Ahtila: On Breathing 

Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris 

September 5 – October 4, 2025 

Voir la version en Français

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

On Breathing, 2024 

Single channel installation. Image 4K UHD 

Audio 2.0. 9 min. 45 sec. en boucle. Crystal Eye 2024 

© Eija-Liisa Ahtila, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery Paris presents a new exhibition by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, which features the French premiere of two new large-scale video installations, On Breathing and APRIL ≈ 61°01' 24°27', 2024. A master of cinematic installations, Ahtila challenges the idea of moving image perspective and constructs an experience of several co-existing temporalities and spaces for the viewers. A continuation of her research over the last decade, the works in the exhibition each explore in their own way forms of ecological narrative and their modes of presentation. Since abandoning a more anthropocentric viewpoint, Ahtila has been seeking to make visible the non-human world, with a focus on trees in particular. While On Breathing depicts the subtle intertwinement of tree branches with the morning mist, APRIL captures the silent passage of one season to the next through spatial movements among the trees and the attentive observation of a forest ecosystem.

On the ground floor of the gallery, the nine-minute projection On Breathing, 2024,is a visual poem in which the focus is the slow and hypnotic movement of the evaporative mist surrounding an oak tree. This morning phenomenon is typical of autumn and winter conditions when the sea remains warmer than the surrounding air and ground. The displacement of the fog and its sound in the branches poetically suggest a vegetal respiration: "The air around the oak tree seems tangible, and the space inside it becomes actual, as if the breathing of the tree were, for a moment, perceivable."

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, who frequently deploys multi-channels and split-screen installations to simultaneously unfold several aspects of one narrative, superimposes layers of video to conjure different temporalities. The wandering of the fog and its interplay with the leaves, the rhythm and the camera angles, all result in a unique, animated tableau.

Considering her recent works as a continuum, Eija-Liisa Ahtila notes that each creative process naturally leads to the next. Since 2011, she has gradually replaced human protagonists with trees and living organisms, resulting in a series of works that address the ecological narrative within the moving image. This new direction questions the contemporary relationship between nature and humanity, as well as the artificial boundary between us and other living beings. "I have attempted to develop visual approaches and methods of storytelling that might show us a way out of anthropocentrism and enable the presence of nonhuman species in our imaginary."

On the gallery lower level, APRIL ≈ 61°01' 24°27', 2024, first exhibited at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, immerses the visitors in the forest of Aulanko Nature Park, Finland, near Ahtila's hometown. Known as a natural environment unsullied by human activity, the forest was filmed for two consecutive seasons in 2022 and 2023, between the end of March and May. If the title of the work evokes the month associated with the regeneration of nature, the 12-meter-long, 8-channel installation shows the subtle transition from late winter to summer. The suite of eight sequences follows a chronological order, showing the forest from the first moments of snowmelt on the left to the premature arrival of summer on the far right.

The scale and horizontal nature of the installation are reminiscent of her iconic work Horizontal, 2011, which came from her desire to represent a giant spruce tree in its entirety. Eija-Liisa Ahtila not only chose to capture the tree by filming it in several horizontal sections, thus avoiding the distortions inherent in the use of a wide-angle lens, but she also decided to present the tree as an horizontal installation on a series of 6 projection screens.

With APRIL, the forest as an ecosystem - where trees and a multitude of organisms and plants constantly interact with each other -  is, for the first time, the center of the artist's attention. The source of the work stems from life in a forest where each singular being is an integrated element of the whole, and the whole is simulaneously within that singular being. To create a cinematic language suited to her subject that immerses us in the forest, the camera movements in the eight sections are fluid and asynchronous, alternating between slow motion and momentary stops. "The theme of APRIL is the spatiality of being, the constant change and shape-taking of the forest, that is its fundamental quality," says Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila was born in Hämeenlinna, Finland in 1959. She has been honored with numerous prizes over the past two decades that include, most recently, becoming Commander, First Class, of the Order of the White Rose of Finland (2020). She works and lives in Helsinki.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila's work has been widely exhibited since the early 1990s. Horizontal is prominently featured in The Power of Trees, on view until 14 September 2025 at Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Kew Gardens, Richmond, near London. Most recently she has had solo exhibitions at Serlachius Manor, Finland (2024); Kröller-Müller Museum (2024), The Netherlands; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, US (2022); the National Gallery of Art, Vilnus, Lithuania (2021); the M Museum, Leuven, Belgium and the Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä, Finland (both 2018). She has also had solo exhibitions at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia (2017); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2016); Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York and Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (both 2015); Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2012); Carré D'Art, Nîmes, France (2012); Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico (2012); Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2011); Parasol Unit, London, UK (2010); Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2008), amongst many others. Ahtila was a jury member at the Venice Film Festival in 2011 and the President of the Jury at the FIDMarseille in 2013 (Festival international de cinéma de Marseille).

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

79 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris

www.mariangoodman.com

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen @ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC - A Landmark Exhibition

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Through January 3, 2027 

Portrait of Adam Pendleton

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus 

Adam Pendleton 

WE ARE NOT (Composition), 2024 

Silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas 

19 x 15 in. (43.3 x 38.1 cm) 

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen,” a landmark exhibition by Adam Pendleton. The artist presents new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work. Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, highlights his unique contributions to contemporary American painting while making use of the architecture of the Museum and the history of the National Mall.

“Introducing Adam Pendleton’s recent work in our 50th year is intentional,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “His exhibition reflects the Hirshhorn’s mission as a 21st-century art museum that amplifies the voices of artists responding to history and place in real time. ‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ invites our almost one million annual visitors to think about the complexities of abstraction within the American experience, and its potential to forge associations among our shared past, present and future.”

“I am delighted to exhibit my work on the occasion of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary,” said Adam Pendleton. “It presents a meaningful opportunity to engage, in subtle and poetic ways, with the Museum’s architecture, position on the National Mall and legacy of showing significant abstract and conceptual work.”

Adam Pendleton is known for his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings that he begins on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These visual experiments are at times carefully controlled and at others freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and then layers them using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing and the act of photography.

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” features Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” “Days,” “WE ARE NOT,” and new “Composition” and “Movement” paintings. An encounter with any of these works, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry. “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation,” the artist has stated.

The artist also debuts “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?),” a new video work that is projected floor to ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968, which is considered to be the culmination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Strobing in and out of darkness, the documentary material is interspersed with found footage and punctuated by flashes of geometric forms, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and representation. The film’s score, by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds and drums.

In its totality, “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” offers a powerful counterpoint to the Museum’s collection surveys that are concurrently presented in adjacent galleries. The exhibition is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan. “It is an honor to invite Adam Pendleton to respond to the Hirshhorn’s singular architecture and location,” said Hankins. “‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ speaks to the vision of our anniversary—a period of simultaneous reflection and forward thinking, a space in which Pendleton has been operating for almost two decades.”

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.

Artist Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include “Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light,” at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); “Adam Pendleton: To Divide By,” at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024); “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); “Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and “Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022).

Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Tate London.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Independence Ave SW and 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

hirshhorn.si.edu

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC

April 4, 2025 - January 3, 2027

Kosmos Klee. The Collection @ Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern - Permanent Exhibition with some 80 changing works from the collection

Kosmos Klee. The Collection

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 

Permanent Exhibition

Paul and Lily Klee with the cat Bimbo, 

Kistlerweg 6, Bern, 1935

Photo: Fee Meisel

Paul Klee

Ohne Titel (Villa am Langensee) 

[Untitled (Villa at the Langensee)], 1896

Watercolour on paper, 9,9 × 15 cm

Private collection, Switzerland, 

deposit at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Paul Klee

Ohne Titel (Rückenakt) [Nude from Behind], 1902

Pencil on paper on cardboard, 32,5 × 28,5 cm

Private collection, Switzerland, 

deposit at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

The dynamic permanent exhibition devoted to Paul Klee invites visitors to immerse themselves in the life and work of this important modern artist. With some 80 changing works from the collection, Kosmos Klee offers a chronological survey of Klee’s artistic career. Biographical and archival material provide an insight into his life and time. In addition, the ‘focus room’ offers a space for smaller exhibitions devoted to individual aspects of Klee’s work, or contributions to the artist’s global reception.

Paul Klee

In den Häusern v. St. Germain 

[ In the Houses of St. Germain], 1914, 110

Watercolour on paper on cardboard

15,5 × 15,9/16,3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Tunesische Scizze [Tunisian Sketch], 1914, 212

Watercolour and pencil on paper on cardboard

17,9 × 12,2 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Ohne Titel (Fabrikanlage) 

[Untitled (Factory Plant)], 1922

Watercolour and pencil on paper on cardboard

10 × 8,9 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Zentrum Paul Klee: The collection

The Zentrum Paul Klee is the world’s most important centre for research into Paul Klee’s life and work, and has one of the most significant collections of the artist’s drawings, watercolours and paintings. Paul Klee was primarily a draughtsman, which is why 80% of the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee consists of works on paper, matching the collected works. Because of the fragility of the works as well as the large size and diversity of the collection, only parts of it can be displayed at once. Paul Klee enjoyed experimenting, not only in terms of content and form but also technically, using light-sensitive paints, inks and papers. For that reason the works need periods of rest between periods on display.

Paul Klee

Karneval im Gebirge 

[Carnival in the Mountains], 1924, 114

Watercolour on primed paper on cardboard

24 × 31,3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Paul Klee

Fische im Kreis [Fishes in a Circle], 1926, 140

Oil and tempera on primed muslin on cardboard

42 × 43 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Nordzimmer [North Room], 1932, 17

Watercolour on paper on cardboard

37 × 55 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Kosmos Klee

With Kosmos Klee. The Collection the Zentrum Paul Klee offers visitors the opportunity to immerse themselves in Paul Klee’s life and work, as well as in the unique collection of the institution. Some 80 rotating and chronologically organised works provide an overview of Klee’s artistic development, from the highly detailed early works via tendencies towards abstraction and the discovery of colour, to the reduced pictorial language of the later work. Each decade of Klee’s artistic career is identified by a colour in the exhibition, allowing visitors to find their way intuitively around the space. Brief introductory texts, biographical photographs and films give deeper insights into the different phases of the work and Paul Klee’s engagement with the people around him.

Paul Klee

Doppel gesicht [Double face], 1933, 383

Coloured pastel and pencil on paper on cardboard

33 × 21 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Paul Klee

Spätes Glühen [Late Glowing], 1934, 29

Pastel on damask on cardboard

26,8 x 32,5/34,3 cm

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, donation of Livia Klee

Aside from his works, the Zentrum Paul Klee also preserves the artist’s archive. In the dynamic permanent exhibition, different treasures from the archive are presented, revealing the various aspects of Paul Klee’s life. His love of music is reflected in his record collection and the scores that Paul Klee, a gifted violinist, played from. Klee’s favourite music can be heard as part of a podcast in the exhibition. Parts of the artist’s collection of natural materials, including shells, stones and pages from herbariums, display Klee’s close relationship with nature and natural processes. Other objects include his watercolour box, his schoolbooks, scribbled over with drawings, as well as letters.

Curator: Fabienne Eggelhöfer

And Cover Star Klee, Paul Klee Artworks on Book Covers Exhibition, Through September 14, 2025.

ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE

Monument im Fruchtland 3, 3006 Bern 

zpk.org

Yee I-Lann @ Kunstmuseum Thun - "Mansau-Ansau" Exhibition

Yee I-Lann

MANSAU-ANSAU

Kunstmuseum Thun

23 August - 30 November 2025

Yee I-Lann 

Photograph by Wee Seng

Yee I-Lann 

TIKAR MEJA PLASTIK’ (2023) Detail

Woven by Aisyah Binti Ebrahim, Alisyah Binti Ebrahim, 

Ardih Binti Belasani, Dayang Binti Tularan, Darwisa

Binti Omar, Dela Binti Aniratih, Endik Binti Arpid, Erna, 

Fazlan Bin Tularan, Kinnuhong Gundasali, Kouh, Luisa

Binti Ebrahim, Makcik Lukkop Belatan, Malaya Binti Anggah, 

Ninna Binti Mursid, Noraidah Jabarah (Kak Budi),

Roziah Binti Jalalid, Sabiyana Binti Belasani, Sanah Belasani, 

Makcik Siti Aturdaya, Tasya binti Tularan and

Venice Foo Chau Xhien

Pandaus fabric, chemical dye, collected plastic waste

Variable format

Artist’s Collection

Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

Yee I-Lann 

Sulu Stories: The Ch’i-lin of Calauit, 2005

Archival pigment inkjet on Epson Premium Photo Luster

60.9 x 60.9 cm

Collection of Singapore Art Museum

Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

MANSAU-ANSAU at the Kunstmuseum Thun is the first major exhibition in Europe devoted to the work of YEE I-LANN. The multidisciplinary Malaysian artist explores traditional arts and crafts from a contemporary vantage point, delving into the narratives of her homeland and addressing the influences of colonialism and the persistence of Indigenous heritage and communities today.

Walking on and on, without a clear destination – this is an approximate translation of MANSAU-ANSAU from the language of the Indigenous Kadazan and Dusun tribes in Yee I-Lann’s homeland of Sabah, Malaysia. The notion of this venturing into the unknown can be frightening, as there is always the risk of getting lost. But it offers an equal chance of discovering something new. The travelling exhibition, shown at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) from 24 December to 25 March and on view at the Kunstmuseum Thun starting 23 August, sheds light on issues involving art and colonialism from a fresh point of view.

The centrepiece of MANSAU-ANSAU is a mat woven from bamboo that forms the basis for people to sit down and commune together. The mat symbolises a space for intimacy and, in the artist’s view, offers a platform for local, democratic, feminist and social equality. “The mat is a place for storytelling and a way to discover new knowledge,” says Yee I-Lann.

In a broader context, Yee I-Lann (b. 1971, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo) examines in her work the complex geopolitical history of Southeast Asia. Working closely with a collective of women weavers from her homeland gives the artist a way to expose oppression using art and craft. In addition to textiles, the exhibition also features photographs, video works and sculptures dealing with themes such as collective reorganisation, realignment and imagination as strategies for the personal and collective future.

Yee I-Lann has ties to Switzerland: her great-granduncle was a mountaineer in Zermatt at the turn of the last century and was buried in the cemetery there after a fatal fall. The fact that she is presenting her first major European exhibition in Thun, in an environment that displays “similar forms and a similar strength” to her homeland, is the result of a chance discovery. Helen Hirsch, Director of the Kunstmuseum Thun and curator of the exhibition, became aware of the Malaysian artist at Art Unlimited in Basel in 2022. “I was captivated by her independent, multidisciplinary and multi-layered form of expression and her respectful attitude towards the local communities she works with,” says Helen Hirsch. Yee I-Lann always makes sure to include the names of the weavers on the labels for her works, something that distinguishes her from many other artists who have their textile works woven anonymously, for example in Morocco or South America. “She collaborates with the weavers on an equal basis.”

Yee I-Lann 

A map of Mansau-Ansau, 2024 (Detail)

Woven by Lili Naming and Shahrizan Bin Juin

Split bamboo pus (Schizostachyum pilosum S.Dransf.) weave, 

Multifilla Matt Sealant, 91 x 183 cm

Artist’s Collection

Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

Yee I-Lann

Installation view of Yee I-Lann’s Picturing Power (2013) 

Giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, Ultra Smooth Fine Art

Variable format

Collection of Singapore Art Museum

Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

The exhibition includes works from the Singapore Art Museum’s collection, including early photo collage series (Sulu Stories [2005], Picturing Power [2013]) as well as a range of woven works, from batik on silk (Orang Besar series [2010]) to split bamboo (Tepo Putih [2019], Tika-a-gagah [2018-19]). Yee I-Lann’s commitment to deconstructing relationships and her incorporation of diverse symbols and aesthetics is evident in works that transcend time and media. All the while, however, her oeuvre is distinctly rooted in material and communal realities, especially those of Indigenous peoples.

Curator: Helen Hirsch, in collaboration with the Singapore Art Museum (SAM)

KUNSTMUSEUM THUN

Thunerhof, Hofstettenstrasse 14, 3602 Thun

www.kunstmuseumthun.ch

Keith Haring: Radiant Vision @ CMA - Columbia Museum of Art

Keith Haring: Radiant Vision

Columbia Museum of Art

September 27, 2025 - February 15, 2026

Keith Haring at work in studio 

Photograph © 1982 Allan Tannenbaum / sohoblues.com

The Columbia Museum of Art (CMA) presents major exhibition Keith Haring: Radiant Vision. Most recently on view at the Pop Art Museum, Seattle, this internationally touring exhibition celebrates the life and work of iconic artist Keith Haring.

“Keith Haring’s art was a pop-culture spark ¬— fast, fearless, and drawn from the concrete heartbeat of New York,” says CMA Executive Director Della Watkins. “With Radiant Vision, the Columbia Museum of Art offers audiences a powerful and playful tribute to Haring’s enduring belief that art belongs to everyone.”

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, KEITH HARING (1958–1990) emerged as a shooting star of the legendary New York art scene in the 1980s. His signature images include dancing figures, a “radiant baby,” a barking dog, a flying saucer, hearts, and figures with televisions for heads. He became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat and grew interested in the color graffiti art of the city’s streets. Haring met Andy Warhol at a gallery exhibition in 1983, and Warhol became Haring’s mentor, friend, and the theme of several of his pieces, including “Andy Mouse.”

In the early ’80s, Keith Haring found a highly effective medium that allowed him to communicate his work with a wider audience — he created chalk drawings on the unused advertising panels in New York City subway stations. These drawings represented a unique conflation of studio practice and public art, cartoons, and graffiti. They became familiar to commuters, who would often stop to engage with the artist. He also attracted the attention of city authorities, who arrested him for vandalism on numerous occasions.

Keith Haring was openly gay and socially conscious, and his murals often reflected his position on social issues. He sought to raise awareness of AIDS, fought against the proliferation of drugs, and advocated for the end of Apartheid. Haring’s oeuvre, from street art to gallery shows, the Pop Shop, and commercial work, is deeply rooted in and reflective of the concept of “art for the people.”

His simply drawn figures were soon to be found on watches and cars, T-shirts and shopping bags, turning Keith Haring into one of the best-known artists of his generation. Radiant Vision is a collection that features over 250 original works including drawings on paper, lithographs, silkscreens, posters, and other items that illustrate the entire span of Haring’s heartbreakingly short but incredibly prolific career.

The exhibition also includes the work of LAII (Angel Ortiz, b. 1967), an artist known for his collaborations with Keith Haring. LAII’s career took off in 1980 when Haring, fresh from the Pennsylvania suburbs, encountered his “Little Angel” tag on a New York street and sought him out.

The regional debut of Keith Haring: Radiant Vision will be celebrated with an early evening preview party on Friday, September 26, as well as a playful daytime program on Saturday, September 27.

Single Source Traveling Exhibition provided by PAN Art Connections.

COLUMBIA MUSEUM OF ART - CMA

1515 Main Street, Columbia, SC 29201

www.columbiamuseum.org

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

www.pacegallery.com

James Bidgood: Dreamlands @ CLAMP, New York + 2025 Monograph from Salzgeber + 1971 film "Pink Narcissus"

James Bidgood | Dreamlands 

CLAMP, New York

Through August 29, 2025

James Bidgood

“Richie Backstage, Sleeping Portrait,”

 mid-1960s/printed later

Digital C-print 

© Estate of James Bidgood

Courtesy of CLAMP, New York

James Bidgood, Dreamlands, Salzgeber, 2025

Book Cover Courtesy of Salzgeber

160 p., 24 × 32 cm - English / Deutsch

ISBN 978-3-95985-718-5

CLAMP presents “James Bidgood | Dreamlands,” an exhibition of photographs marking the launch of the monograph of the same title from Salzgeber, in addition to recent screenings of the artist’s cult classic film, “Pink Narcissus,” at theaters across the United States and Europe.

The book combines iconic motifs from the artist’s oeuvre with many previously unpublished images. The exhibition at CLAMP includes twelve of these new photographs selected from the estate archives, along with a large-scale print of “Pan”—the monograph’s cover image.

“Pink Narcissus,” James Bidgood’s film from 1971, described as a “kaleidoscopic fever dream of queer desire,” was recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and has been playing at theaters since late 2024, including MoMA (New York), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), BAM (New York), Metrograph (New York), and other screens in London, Bologna, San Francisco, Seattle, Provincetown, Tucson, St. Louis, etc.

James Bidgood passed away in 2022 at the age of 88. A New Yorker for over 70 years, he was adored and admired by generations of artists and cinephiles alike.

When James Bidgood first came to New York from Wisconsin in the 1950s, he worked as a drag performer and occasional set and costume designer at Club 82 in the East Village. After studying at Parsons School of Design from 1957 to 1960, James Bidgood found jobs as a window dresser and costume designer.

He then went on to work as a photographer for men’s physique publications and began creating his own personal photographs and films that greatly benefited from his talents in theater design and costume construction. It was during this period in the early 1960s that James Bidgood began working on his masterpiece—the 8mm opus “Pink Narcissus.”

In his tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, he handcrafted sets using humble materials to create a theatrical dreamland in which artifice became transcendent. With hand-tailored clothing, saturated lighting, and lots of glitter, James Bidgood built a cosmos of queer belonging, populated with angelic figures of male beauty—including Cupid, Pan, and other mythological gods, along with harlequins, soldiers, firemen, hustlers, drag queens, altar boys, and more.

Bidgood’s confined domestic production speaks to both necessity and liberation—”a queer creative spirit refusing to be constrained by material limitations.” In fact, the artist and his models would eat, sleep, and frolic within the sets until it was time to tear them down and begin building the next scene.

Within this space, and in front of his lens, the homosexuals that were ostracized by larger society could be beautiful, glamorous, complex, silly, or simply themselves.

CLAMP 

247 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001

clampart.com

James Bidgood | Dreamlands

CLAMP, New York, July 10 – August 29, 2025

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

www.pacegallery.com

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

www.pacegallery.com

Nathalie Du Pasquier Exhibition @ Nivola Museum, Orani, Italy

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Volare Guardare Costruire

Museo Nivola, Orani

May 17 – September 14, 2025

Portrait of Nathalie Du Pasquier

Photo by Ilvio Gallo

Museo Nivola presents Volare Guardare Costruire (to fly, to look, to build), a site-specific project by Nathalie Du Pasquier, a French artist and designer based in Milan.

Conceived especially for the museum’s spaces, the exhibition takes the form of a retrospective dedicated to the artist’s painting production from her beginnings to the present day. At the same time, it is an environmental installation that merges painting, architecture, and design. The exhibition unfolds through a series of structures designed by the artist, transforming the museum into a space to walk through, explore, and inhabit.

The exhibition thus initiates a dialogue between the artist’s ephemeral architectures and the historical structure of the building – the former washhouse of Orani, now the beating heart of Museo Nivola.

Inside these “rooms” and on the walls of the museum are works created from the 1980s to today, which tell the story of the evolution of Du Pasquier’s visual language: a lexicon made of figuration and abstraction, in which human figures and the narrative dimension gradually give way to the theme of still lifes, made of simple and everyday objects, which delicately evoke the human presence, and then again to geometric shapes and abstract constructions. The whole is bathed in a midday light that gives the paintings a metaphysical air, almost as if we were in front of modern versions of Morandi’s canvases or, in other ways, of the purist ones of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant.

The title, Volare Guardare Costruire, refers to three phases of Nathalie Du Pasquier’s pictorial production. Volare (to fly) evokes the moment of detachment from the design of design objects towards the freer practice of painting. And it is perhaps no coincidence that many of the works of this phase present scenes seen from above, with a bird’s eye view, a symbol of the power of the imagination, of its ability to soar high and expand freely.

Guardare (to look) refers to a second phase, to the need to abandon purely imaginative scenes to dedicate oneself to a quiet and precise observation of reality, even of the most everyday and apparently insignificant objects, which instead reveal to an interested gaze, extraordinary forms, precious details and the ability to understand within oneself the complexity of existence. They are visions that the artist defines as “very silent and very still”, which invite one to rediscover the pleasure of the sensitive world through silent and attentive observation.

Dissatisfied, at times, with the sensible appearance of reality, Nathalie Du Pasquier finally dedicates herself to Costruire (to build), creating original structures, small three-dimensional abstract constructions that are then portrayed with the brush, brought back to the two-dimensional plane of her canvases. Thus, she triggers a complex dynamic between reality and representation, which is a wonderful metaphor for painting.

With this exhibition, the Nivola Museum confirms its commitment to promoting the dialogue between art, design and architecture, offering an immersion in the visionary world of an artist who continues to reinvent the rules of seeing and building.

Nathalie Du Pasquier (Bordeaux, 1957) moved to Milan in 1979. Co-founder of the Memphis collective, since the mid-1980s she has devoted herself mainly to painting, developing an unmistakable visual universe where formal research combines with a profound reflection on space and perception. Her works have been exhibited at Villa Noailles Hyères (Toulon, France), Kunsthal Aarhus (Aarhus, Denmark), GFZT Museum of Contemporary Art (Leipzig, Germany), Camden Arts Center (London), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna) and MACRO in Rome.

Curated by Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, Luca Cheri

NIVOLA MUSEUM

MUSEO NIVOLA

Via Gonare 2 08026 Orani

museonivola.it

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

April 17 – May 23, 2025

ALEC SOTH

Katherine’s Drawing, 2024 

© Alec Soth, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists, an exhibition exploring the cultivation of creativity through playful and surprising photographs made at undergraduate art programs. Rather than offering the guidance promised by the show’s title, the series presents reflections on artmaking at different stages of life, exploring the connections between photography, time, and aging. Inspired in part by Walker Evans’s Polaroids of young people, the photographs range from bright still lifes made from art department props to enigmatic images of students and oblique self-portraits.

The series grew from Soth’s interest in portraits that Walker Evans made towards the end of his life, depicting young people at colleges and universities. Best known for his Farm Security Administration-era documentary work, in the 1970s Walker Evans began working with the new Polaroid SX-70 camera, recording signs and lettering among other subjects. Many of Evans’s celebrated Polaroids depict the vernacular subjects for which he was best known. But for Soth, “the work I love are his portraits of young people made while visiting universities,” he writes. The Polaroids “sparked something,” Alec Soth notes, and looking for similar encounters, he began visiting art departments around the U.S. Rather than giving lectures, Soth met with students and classes in exchange for access, writing that he “liked just hanging around and pretending I was an art student.” 

With humor and humility, Soth’s images sometimes suggest an unbridgeable distance between himself and the art school world he records. Artist Lecture presents Soth’s view of a lecture hall seen from the podium. The photograph captures seats filled with students and faculty, recording their amused, bored, or distracted reactions to Soth’s camera. In Katherine’s Drawing, pictured on the monograph’s cover, a pencil sketch of Soth’s face is framed behind cracked glass. Drawn by Soth’s intern at his request, the work’s shattered surface undermines any authority or self-seriousness it might otherwise embody.

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists

MACK, September 2024

Embossed linen hardcover

72 pages, 61 plates, 10.5 x 10.75 inches

ISBN 978-1-915743-76-3

More often, the images find Alec Soth at play, reclaiming the freedom and experimentation that belongs to beginners in any pursuit. Still lifes depict unexpected configurations of materials used to teach drawing and painting. In Still Life II, a colorful assembly of objects includes red apples and a scowling bust, and Alec Soth himself hidden at the back of the classroom. In a number of portraits, Alec Soth photographs art students framed by their work and their tools, peeking from behind canvases or holding a shutter release cable. In Ameerah, a young woman poses on a stool with her hands clasped. A study in blues, greys, and browns, the image also doubles as a self-portrait, with Soth’s own reflection visible in a smudged mirror.

ALEC SOTH is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Recent solo exhibitions include Alec Soth: A Room of Rooms at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and Alec Soth: Reading Room at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, on view through May 4. His photographs have been featured in solo survey shows organized by Jeu de Paume, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and MediaSpace, London. In 2008, Alec Soth created Little Brown Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling. His work is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. The artist’s monographs include Sleeping by the Mississippi, NIAGARA, The Last Days of W, Broken Manual, Gathered Leaves, Songbook, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, and A Pound of Pictures. Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. He is a member of Magnum Photos. 

FRAENKEL GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108 

fraenkelgallery.com

Dominic Chambers: For You: All the Color in the World @ Walls Off Washington at Saint Louis University

Dominic Chambers

For You: All the Color in the World

Walls Off Washington at Saint Louis University

On permanent view

DOMINIC CHAMBERS 

outside SLU's Searls Hall

Photo by Bobby Best, courtesy of Kranzberg Arts Foundation

DOMINIC CHAMBERS

For You: All the Color in the World

Photo by Bobby Best, courtesy of Kranzberg Arts Foundation

The Kranzberg Arts Foundation (KAF), in collaboration with Saint Louis University and the St. Louis Literary Award program, announced a new mural by acclaimed artist DOMINIC CHAMBERS. 

This mural, on the Walls Off Washington at Saint Louis University’s Searls Hall, explores the legacy of the Underground Railroad and highlights its significance in Missouri and the St. Louis region.

This initiative is closely tied to the 2025 St. Louis Literary Award, which honors Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead. Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, inspires the mural, creating a robust dialogue between literature, history and public art. The collaboration underscores a commitment to aligning the arts, education and historical reflection, fostering meaningful engagement with the local community.

The project aims to illuminate St. Louis’ historical connections to the Underground Railroad and offer a space for collective reflection and learning. Through a dynamic partnership with Saint Louis University, educators, students and the public will have opportunities to engage with the mural and related programming, including discussions on art, history and literature.

Born in St. Louis and residing and working in New Haven, Conn., DOMINIC CHAMBERS creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models, such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure and reflection. A writer himself, Dominic Chambers is often inspired by literature ­and has cited Magical Realism, alongside writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, as significantly influential to his practice. Dominic Chambers received his B.F.A from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee, WI in 2016, and his M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art in 2019. In 2023, he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. 

"We are honored and overjoyed to welcome Dominic Chambers home to St. Louis for this significant public art project," said Gina Grafos, Chief Curator and Director of Visual & Literary Art at Kranzberg Arts Foundation. "Dominic’s work eloquently intertwines history, memory, and storytelling to create a dialogue that resonates deeply with our region. His new mural, 'For You: All the Color in the World,' draws on multifarious art historical influences and the transformative concept of the veil—a metaphor that invites us to reimagine the inner landscape of our shared experiences. His return is not only a celebration of his extraordinary artistic practice but also a powerful tribute to the vibrant narratives that shape our past and inspire our future. We could not imagine a more fitting artist to bring this vision to life."

The Walls Off Washington mural initiative, a project of the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, continues to serve as a platform for large-scale, thought-provoking works that reflect St. Louis's cultural and historical fabric. 

KRANZBERG ARTS FOUDATION

St. Louis, Missouri

kranzbergartsfoundation.org

SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY

St. Louis, Missouri

www.slu.edu

THE WALLS OFF WASHINGTON

St. Louis, Missouri

wallsstl.com

Bruce Nauman @ Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles - "Pasadena Years" Exhibition

Bruce Nauman

Pasadena Years

Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles 

19 February - 26 April 2025

From left to right: Bruce Nauman, Justine Nauman,

Marcia Tucker, and Nauman’s son, Erik, 1970

Photo courtesy Bruce Nauman / Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery presents its first solo exhibition with BRUCE NAUMAN. Pasadena Years is a historical reflection on the prolific decade that established one of the most important contemporary artists of our time. The exhibition emphasizes the radical foundation of Nauman’s practice while he lived in Los Angeles between 1969-79. Across the entire gallery and garden, works on view include sculptures, installations, sound works, videos, works on paper, and editions. Pasadena Years notably marks Nauman’s first exhibition in Los Angeles in over 30 years and includes Text for a Room, 1973-2025, a work that the artist recreated for the first time since its debut at his earliest retrospective, which originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1972.

In 1969, Bruce Nauman arrived in Los Angeles at the age of 27 with his wife and son. Following his MFA from the University of California, Davis, and an NEA grant in Southhampton, New York, he subsequently relocated to Los Angeles for his small but notable community based there: his parents, his dealer, Nicholas Wilder, and his friends—Walter Hopps, Edward Kienholz, and Richard Jackson. He and his family lived for eight years in Hopps’s Pasadena house along with Jackson before moving to nearby Altadena. In 1972, Bruce Nauman was the subject of a retrospective coorganized by LACMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which thereafter traveled extensively through Europe. As Jane Livingston, the LACMA curator who co-organized the retrospective with Marcia Tucker, described in 1972: “[Bruce] is not only ahead of his audience but ahead of himself.”

The 1960s in Southern California was an important period for conceptual art. The Ferus Gallery (1957-66), founded by Hopps and Kienholz, was largely focused on avant-garde work from the West Coast. In 1962, Hopps became the curator of the Pasadena Museum of Art, famously opening the first U.S. exhibition of Marcel Duchamp shortly thereafter. LACMA opened to the public three years later, in 1965. Within this decade, Light and Space, Finish Fetish, California pop art and assemblage movements had all simultaneously emerged. In 1966, while based in Northern California, Nauman had his first commercial solo exhibition at Nicholas Wilder Gallery (located up the block from Ferus), which contextualized him with the emergence of West Coast conceptualism. This development would help pave the way for a coming decade that would bring Nauman into relationships with other prominent LA-based artists such as Larry Bell, Vija Celmins, Maria Nordman, and Ed Ruscha.

This exhibition opens with works from 1968-69, highlighting a time when Bruce Nauman gained exposure in several significant group shows across Europe, including documenta (1968), When Attitudes Become Form (1969), and Anti-Illusion (1969). Performance Corridor, 1969, on loan from the Panza Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, marks a crucial transformation in Nauman’s practice that focused on phenomenological explorations in space. Initially used by the artist as a set for a video piece, it was later exhibited in Anti-Illusion as an autonomous sculpture with a narrow walkway and dead end that leads viewers to imagine the physical constraints of engaging the object. This gesture would open up his practice to an era of thinking through a wide variety of room-sized and corridor-like structures that relate to the body, space, movement, and light. On one side of the Performance Corridor, rare performance instructions from 1968 are on view.

In dialogue with Performance Corridor, just across the gallery, is a selection of videos that grew out of Nauman’s activities in his studio. Revolving Upside Down, 1969, and Violin Tuned D.E.A.D., 1969, were both made in Pasadena and represent the breadth of his simple and persistent, action-as-material performances for video. Bruce Nauman, in his own words, considers these works an answer to “the fundamental question of what an artist does when left alone in the studio. My conclusion was that [if ] I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”

On view in the garden, Dark (1968) is a 4’ x 4’ x 4” solid steel slab with the work “dark” written on the bottom. In 1968, Bruce Nauman proposed Dark to the Southwestern College of Chula Vista, CA Purchase Award Exhibition, and subsequently won. Once the acquisition was announced, students and faculty responded in outrage to the use of school funds for such an austere work, which led John Baldessari, an art faculty member at the time, to defend the work in a public lecture. A minimal tombstone meant to be displayed outdoors, the piece was included in Nauman’s 1972-74 retrospective tour throughout the United States and Europe, and recalls other other straightforward works by the artist that mentally confront viewers with the imaginative, abyssmal space of the elsewhere. Nearby, for Microphone/Tree Piece (1971), originally conceived for legendary Los Angeles art patrons Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, Nauman discreetly places a microphone into a pre-drilled hole upon a tree and amplifies the sound of the tree growing into the neighboring, interior lobby space of the gallery.

A gallery dedicated to Nauman’s text-based works presents early examples of his conceptual practice with linguistic play, propositions, and puns. During this period, Bruce Nauman began concurrently creating editions with Marian Goodman through her former art publishing company, Multiples, Inc. The two worked together on several works, including one on view: the artist book LAAir (1970), featuring spreads of color photographs the artist took of the city’s smog. In addition, a selection of his rare presstypes are on view, along with additional prints made with Gemini G.E.L. and Cirrus.

The Main Gallery is transformed into a rigid architectural setting that consists of two large works: Funnel Piece (Françoise Lambert Installation), 1971, and Text for a Room, 1973-2025.

Bruce Nauman originally designed Funnel Piece to physically wedge and occupy the entirety of a pre-existing room of a gallery in Milan. The floating walls are a variation on his corridor works that look at human physiology and how it shapes our perception of space. Text for a Room, recreated for the first time since its 1973 debut, includes a sheet of performance instructions at its narrow entryway; the viewer enters, prepared to execute an action, but is unaware of what will be encountered. The sensation echoes what Nauman would later reflect on in 1980: “the feeling that I had about a lot of that work was going up the stairs in the dark and either having an extra stair that you didn’t expect or not having one that you thought was going to be there—that kind of misstep that surprises you every time it happens.”

This exhibition was organized by Philipp Kaiser with Samantha Gregg of Marian Goodman Gallery, and in close collaboration with Bruce Nauman and his studio.

Bruce Nauman has been the focus of over 250 solo exhibitions, most recently at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024); SITE Santa Fe, NM (2023); and Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, Venice (2021-22). Recent retrospectives include those at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2022-23) and M Woods, Beijing (2022). An eponymous survey at Tate (2020) traveled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2021), while Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts, a comprehensive retrospective, made its debut at Schaulager, Basel (2018) and then traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York and MoMA P.S.1 (201819). Notable awards include the Praemium Imperiale (2004) and the Frederick Kiesler Prize (2014) and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (2009 and (1999).

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

1120 Seward Street, Los Angeles, CA

www.mariangoodman.com