GENEVA.- Pace Gallery is presenting a two-part group exhibition that brings together miniature artworks by 39 artists from within and beyond the gallery’s roster. Spanning painting, photography, textile, sculpture and video, Little Things is being presented in a site-specific display featuring bespoke plinths, shelves, and wallpaper to position the intimately scaled artworks within a cabinet of curiosities.
Juxtaposing contemporary artists such as Yoshitomo Nara, Kiki Smith and Nigel Cooke, with masters of the twentieth century – Jean Arp, Louise Nevelson, Antoni Tàpies –Little Things offers a unique and intimate viewing experience. United by their scale, the distinctive display provokes unexpected resonances between artists rarely exhibited side by side.
On view 10 November – 4 December, the first iteration of the two-part exhibition focuses on figuration, exploring the body as well as animals and various biomorphic forms. Among the highlights of Little Things Part I is a suite of Robert Longo’s charcoal and graphite drawings. Showcasing Longo’s mastery of his medium, these works pay tribute to the paintings that revolutionized classical notions of form, including those by Pablo Picasso, Kazimir Malevich and Jasper Johns.
Little Things Part I brings to light a shared artistic awareness for the lines and silhouette of the human body across multiple mediums. Photographs by Peter Hujar, india ink drawings by Alexander Calder and abstracted Female Nude drawings by Louise Nevelson’s are united by a visual lexicon. Similarly, radical multidisciplinary artist Lucas Samaras’s reclining nude bronze sculpture, AutoPolaroid works, and oil pastel drawings highlight the artist’s enduring fascination with the human form.
Little Things PartII will open on 10 December, with a particular focus on abstraction. Geometric and modular forms take centre stage in the second part of this exhibition, finding formal echoes across multiple mediums. Using handmade dyes from the plants and insects of her Tangier studio garden, Yto Barrada’s textile-based works speak at once to the unique environment of her practice and the history of hard-edge abstraction, referencing Frank Stella’s brightly coloured Morocco series.
Modular, abstract sculpture also features as a key theme in Little Things Part II. Exhibited alongside one another, seemingly disparate artists such as Louise Nevelson, Joel Shapiro, Prabhavathi Meppayil and Yin Xiuzhen are connected by a shared experimentation with the texture and materiality of abstraction.
