NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery announced its inaugural season of programming for its new flagship gallery in New York City, located at 540 West 25th Street. After almost six decades of history in Manhattan, Pace will cement its commitment to Chelsea with a new global headquarters in the heart of the neighborhood. Open to the public on September 14, 2019, Pace will present a series of exhibitions throughout the new building, including: an exhibition dedicated to Alexander Calder occupying the first floor gallery; a show of new paintings by New York-based artist Loie Hollowell on the second floor; an installation of new work by David Hockney on the third floor; and a presentation charting the evolution of Fred Wilsons chandelier sculptures installed on the seventh floor. The inaugural exhibition represents several firsts, including Loie Hollowells premiere exhibition with Pace in New York. Additional details on each exhibition, accompanying publications, and related programming will be announced over the course of the summer.
For nearly six decades, Pace has celebrated and advanced the work of creative pioneers, said Marc Glimcher, Pace Gallery President and CEO. They are our inspiration, mission, and the source of our vision. Pace has designed and crafted every element of our new global headquarters to provide a vehicle for artists to tell their stories as richly as they deserve to be told and as dynamically as our communities deserve to experience them. It is an honor to inaugurate this gallery with the work of artists who have been so instrumental in creating the fabric of our program; representing both our vibrant history and our exciting future.
Paces new global headquarters is being developed by Weinberg Properties and designed by Bonetti / Kozerski Architecture, in close collaboration with Marc Glimcher. Spanning eight stories and measuring approximately 75,000 square feet, Paces new building more than doubles its current exhibition space in New York and features five distinct galleries, including both indoor and outdoor spaces. Each gallery allows for a broad range of installation styles and artistic media, with features such as an entirely column-free design, high loading capacities, and flexible lighting plans creating extraordinarily nimble galleries that can support a diverse approach to exhibition programming.
Inaugural Exhibitions
First Floor:
Alexander Calder
In close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, New York, Pace will inaugurate the 3,600-square-foot first-floor gallery with a focused exhibition dedicated to Alexander Calder. The exhibition will examine the breadth of the artists practice beginning in the mid-1920s and leading up to his creation in 1931 of the mobilean unprecedented form of kinetic sculpture that created a true rupture in the trajectory of art. From his gestural Animal Sketchings and massless wire portraits of the 1920s to his abstract oil paintings of 1930 and the swift progression to motorized objects and hanging mobiles, this exhibition will capture the remarkable transition from potential to actual energy in Calders work and underscore his relentless pursuit of the vitality and life force in art.
Second Floor:
Loie Hollowell
The artists premiere exhibition with Pace in New York will take place in the new buildings second floor gallery. The exhibition will showcase a series of new large-scale paintings that continue Hollowells investigation of bodily landscapes and sacred iconography through allusions to the human form. Drawing inspiration from artists like Agnes Pelton, Georgie OKeefe, and Judy Chicago, Hollowells works abstract the most intimate parts of the human body into primal shapes, such as the mandora and the lingam, in an examination of sexuality, conception, birth, and motherhood. In each work, the artist utilizes color and dimensionalityat times manipulating the canvas with three-dimensional formsto amplify the phenomenological presence of her corporeal compositions.
Third Floor:
David Hockney
The third-floor gallery will be dedicated to an exhibition of new work by David Hockney. This exhibition will present a 24-panel panoramic drawing and four additional individual drawings. Capturing the arrival of spring in Normandy, these works emphasize Hockneys ability to unite multiple spatial and temporal experiences of a place into a single image. Influenced by such disparate sources as traditional Chinese scroll painting, contemporary time-based art, and the medieval Bayeux Tapestry, produced in England and housed nearby in Normandy, these new works showcase Hockneys continued experimentation with the representation of space.
Sixth Floor:
Alexander Calder, Joel Shapiro, and Tony Smith
Offering panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline, the entire sixth floor is devoted to a 4,800 square-foot outdoor exhibition space that can accommodate large-scale sculptural installations. Partially covered by the seventh floor, the design of this space creates the sense of an outdoor room. Exhibitions on the sixth floor will rotate two to three times per year, and for the inaugural installation, Pace will present three monumental outdoor sculptures by three generations of sculptors: Alexander Calder, Joel Shapiro, and Tony Smith.
Seventh Floor:
Fred Wilson
The seventh-floor exhibition will showcase the evolution of Fred Wilsons celebrated chandelier sculptures, which the artist began in 2003 when he represented the United States at the 50th Venice Biennale with Speak of Me as I Am. Since then, Wilsons Murano glass chandeliers, with their evolving shifts in scale, materials, and complexity, have become vehicles for the artists meditations on blackness, death, and beauty. Installed hanging from the gallerys 19-foot-high ceilings, the presentation will include five chandelier sculptures from the artists first to his most recent, conceived for the 15th Istanbul Biennial in Fall of 2017.
Looking Ahead to 2019 and 2020
Taking full advantage of the dynamic programing the new building will support, Pace is planning a robust series of exhibitions over the course of 2019 and 2020 and will launch a new interdisciplinary series of live and moving- image programming.
In the late fall of 2019, Pace will present exhibitions dedicated to Mary Corse on the first floor; Chinese painter Li Songsong on the second; and longstanding gallery artist Richard Tuttle on the third. Corses exhibition of new paintings will be her first with the gallery in New York since joining Pace in 2018.
Looking ahead to 2020the 60th anniversary of the galleryPaces new headquarters will host major exhibitions by a diverse range of the gallerys artists, including debut New York shows for new additions to Pace, such as Lynda Benglis and Arlene Shechet, as well as exhibitions dedicated to pioneers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Jean Dubuffet, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Ryman.