Hiding in Plain Sight: Pace Gallery opens a group exhibition
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Monday, December 9, 2024


Hiding in Plain Sight: Pace Gallery opens a group exhibition
Installation view of Hiding in Plain Sight, 540 West 25th Street, New York, July 14 – August 20, 2021. Photography courtesy of Pace Gallery.



NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery is presenting a group exhibition that looks at the ways in which a wide range of artists from the early 2000s to present day use the language of Minimalism and abstraction to distill complex subjects into forms that reveal new frameworks of meaning, revelation, and resistance for the here and now. Curated by Senior Director and Curator Andria Hickey, the exhibition spans two floors of Pace’s gallery at 540 West 25th Street and brings together 18 international artists from within and beyond the gallery’s program, including: Etel Adnan, Yto Barrada, Aria Dean, Simon Denny, Torkwase Dyson, Sam Gilliam, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Kapwani Kiwanga, Alicja Kwade, Tony Lewis, Rodney McMillian, Trevor Paglen, Walid Raad, Adrián Villar Rojas, Hito Steyerl, Rayyane Tabet, Jessica Vaughn, and Fred Wilson. Showcasing a wide range of media as well as outdoor sculpture, Hiding in Plain Sight examines new modes of abstraction that hold references to specific histories, entities, and contexts within the formal dimensions of the work. Like vessels that carry information from one site to another, the artworks in this exhibition manifest the complexity of modern life in forms that conceal their subject matter through aesthetic intervention.

Over the course of its 60-year history, Pace Gallery has presented thematic group exhibitions that have taken stock of the evolving relationship between form and content as articulated by each new generation of artists. These include such important exhibitions as Grids (1979) and Logical Conclusions (2005), which explored the systems and strategies of Minimalism in the 1960s through the early 2000s, and the groundbreaking exhibition Blackness in Abstraction (2016), curated by Adrienne Edwards, which examined Blackness as a powerful, evocative, and animating force in abstract art from the 1940s to the present day. Building on the legacy of these important exhibitions, Hiding in Plain Sight suggests new active relationships between form and content in the ways artists interpret and express meaning today.

The artists included in the exhibition often begin their work with a process of research that explores subjects from a seemingly disparate range of sources, revealing unexpected narratives and a circuitous web of historic, infrastructural, or geopolitical connections that are often hidden in plain sight. Distilled and abstracted, this information is mapped within the formal and material dimensions of each work, such as the scale, shape, color, or form. Upon close inspection, the works bear alternative readings that position the subject matter, and the object itself, as a site for the contemplation of a fragmented and complex experience of global life today. Seemingly opaque, the artworks are encrypted with allusions to a multitude of subjects—from the extraction of raw materials and industrial production processes, to the psychological impact of color, and geometries that reflect the infrastructures of racial capitalism and trauma.




For example, Trevor Paglen’s Trinity Cube (2017) is deceptively elemental in form, yet on closer inspection its materials speak volumes. The composition of the cube references the irradiated glass of the Fukushima Exclusion Zone in Japan, and trinitite, the mineral created when the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, heating the desert’s surface to the point where it turned sand into a greenish glass. Bringing these materials together in a single form, Paglen’s work maps sublime connections between two distant sites of disaster and discovery, surveillance and control. Similarly, Rayyane Tabet’s Steel Rings (2013—ongoing), installed on the second-floor terrace of the gallery, evokes the language of Minimalism; however, the object functions as a surrogate for a specific place, time, and corporate entity. Replicating the steel rings of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, a form of infrastructure shaped by the borders of five political entities across the Middle East, each steel ring is the same diameter and thickness of the original pipeline, engraved with the distance from the pipe’s source and its corresponding geographic coordinates, and representing a single kilometer in the 1213 kilometers of the pipeline’s convoluted journey through fraught geopolitical territories.

Kapwani Kiwanga’s exploration of color in her series Linear Paintings, of which four are included in the exhibition, suggests a relationship to the chromatic painting of Imi Knoebel or Blinky Palermo. However, these paintings on drywall depict the two-tone color palettes used in public institutions for specific psychological impacts. Creating connections between late 19th-century hygiene movements and hospital reforms, along with the color theory of Faber Birren, which has been employed in spaces of work, learning, surveillance, healing, and care, Kiwanga’s linear divisions of color reference sites of institutional control that utilized such theories to police social divisions and maintain power structures. Other artists in the exhibition navigate abstraction as a subjective space for remapping traumatic histories. Torkwase Dyson’s paintings and sculptures explore the spatial and geometric conditions of extraction in the Anthropocene. Transforming the architectonics of containment and control into planar fields and shapes of resilience delineated by horizon lines, Dyson’s paintings use shape, material and form in ways that reflect the racial conditions of extraction to build a new aesthetic foundation for abstraction.

Themes of absence, apparition, and archaeological time are reflected throughout the exhibition. Hito Steyerl’s video installation How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, echoes throughout the first floor of the exhibition, offering visitors five lessons in invisibility. Examining the circulation of images and the nature of infrastructure in the Information Age, Steyerl’s installation wryly maps formal, symbolic, and real connections between the worlds of art, economics, and global political regimes. Like Steyerl’s instructional video, the works throughout the exhibition chart unexpected but real connections between art’s formal attributes and the global infrastructures that characterize contemporary life.

Like the invisible systems and transactions in daily life, the works in this exhibition suggest that the practice of distilling and abstracting information in contemporary art echoes the mechanisms of global infrastructural space. In contrast to highways and telephone lines, core infrastructure today, such as broadband internet and global supply chains, is hidden in plain sight, concealing the perpetual circulation of information and goods in its very structure. These artworks similarly carry and conceal information but for different ends. Transcripts hidden within the visual poetics of each work suggest latent modes of resistance, revealing unseen connections buried in the infrastructural space of both the past and present. Embodied in the physical material of the artwork, social and historical events, people, and issues span time and space to create encounters in the here and now. By embracing opacity, as Édouard Glissant has suggested, these works offer an “infinite variety” of poetic landscapes in response—nonlinear, contradictory and active in the creation of new forms of interpretation and meaning.










Today's News

August 12, 2021

A hidden trove gives a glimpse of opera in the Wild West

Sotheby's & MGM Resorts to present auction of masterworks by Pablo Picasso from the MGM Resorts Fine Art Collection

Artemisia Gentileschi's famed self-portrait added to Buckingham Palace Masterpieces exhibition

Roland Auctions NY announces results of the sale of the Collection of Congressman Lester L. Wolff

'Titian: Women, Myth & Power' reunites artist's renowned series of mythological masterpieces

Amon Carter receives significant photography and works on paper gift of over 240 works

More women muscle in on the world of vintage cars

Exhibition highlights one of the world's leading private collections of works on paper

A slice of history: Charles and Diana cake sells for £1,850

The thorny history of the Salzburg Festival's logo

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki opens an exhibition of works from the city's public art collection

A supernatural dance explorer's art and wanderings

Exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by John Alexander opens at Berggruen Gallery

Marcia Nasatir, who broke a glass ceiling in Hollywood, dies at 95

Instagram 'sorry' after pulling poster for new Almodovar film

Jennifer Hudson knew Aretha Franklin. To play her, she had to learn more.

'West Side Story,' which won't reopen, will return $10 million grant

Audio-visual installation explores the environment and eco-system that is home to one of Scotland's rarest birds of prey

In-person New York Film Festival unveils lineup

Greece mourns American who revived ancient Nemea Games

Auction features more than 200 quality lots from private institutions, estates and individuals

UTA Artist Space opens a solo exhibition by artist Blitz Bazawule

Hiding in Plain Sight: Pace Gallery opens a group exhibition

Damiani to publish "Zone Eleven" by Mike Mandel

The unusual things that inspire art - and why it happens

AYAA Present: Photography Exhibition of Luo Bing's "Blossom" in Los Angeles




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful