LONDON.- Pace London presents THERE WAS A BAD TREE, a collective exhibition of works by N. Dash, John Giorno, and Alfred Jensen. The exhibition is on view from 13 October to 15 November 2014 at 6–10 Lexington Street, marking Dash and Giorno’s first exhibitions with the gallery.

Taking its title from the eponymous 2001 poem by Giorno, THERE WAS A BAD TREE brings together three American artists, all rarely exhibited in the UK. John Giorno’s sound piece plays alongside new work by N. Dash and a collection of Alfred Jensen’s paintings which range in date from 1958 to 1975. Although each artist belongs to and emerged from distinct cultural milieux, the exhibition explores the formal and conceptual affinities shared be- tween the three, revealing the broad cultural influences and forces that inspire each artists’ practice and bridges their work.

Jensen’s intricate methodology reflects a distinctive approach to painting, refining his wide-ranging studies of science, math, and philosophy— such as Goethe colour theory, Pythagorean mathematics, the Mayan calendar, the I Ching—into a personal artistic vernacular. Jensen employs colour as an organizing system within the diagrammatic structure of his paintings, creating optical rhythms that allude to a deeper symbolic meaning. His paintings present information whose specificity may be obscured by the erudition of Jensen’s beliefs and interests, but nonetheless gestures toward an alternate mode of painting and history. Jensen’s work can “be seen as the opening of a possibility of other kinds of relations among things…. If all Western painting up to Jensen’s time had as its condition an underlying notion of how things are disclosed according to a particular understanding of time and space (perhaps ultimately derived from the Greeks), we sense in Jensen’s painting a striving toward another way of being in the world,” wrote art historian Michael Newman.1

“If Jensen’s works are preoccupied with centuries–old logics that strive to make sense of sense, Dash’s are concerned with the sensorial here and now. Viewing Jensen’s paintings is akin to embarking on an archaeological dig. Dash creates new artefacts. What unites these very different practices is their subtle revival of the romantic pursuit. Both speak in terms that are both expansive and precise. Both deeply invest in conveying a sense of wonder. Both foreground sense perception and readily make use of the authenticity of lived experience.” — Jens Hoffman2

Jensen’s dynamic compositions find certain affinities with Dash’s wall hung constructions. As one can see a landscape shift with the slightest movement of perspective, looking at Dash’s works from differing vantage points reveals a completely different experience for each composition. Their multipart constructions belie their sense of unity; each composition is a study in geometry and equipoise. Dash’s works possess a range of materials: some are cloaked in painted linen, while others hang on the wall and display planes of adobe or adobe coated with graphite. Though they resist definition, they are the sum of their details. Her sculptures, which she has said “inter- weave time and space and navigate information in idiosyncratic ways that search for something that is outside of language,” can be seen as the starting point and primary source for her painting.

Echoing N. Dash’s evocations of landscape, a recording of Giorno reading his poem “THERE WAS A BAD TREE,” which weaves a dynamic narrative around the life of a tree, will play in the gallery. Working in sound, performance, visual art and poetry, Giorno has pushed the context and possibilities of poetry in his more than five decades of work. Describing his process as growing out of Pop art and Dada, Giorno says that he “finds” sounds and ideas and then makes them concrete through the act of writing. “When poets write a poem, they don’t really see words first… they first hear a word in their mind; they experience it as sound and feel something. This is the moment wisdom arises—the sound becomes a word when it gets written down on the page, and then it becomes a poem,” he has said.3 Giorno’s work uses words but pushes beyond their literal meanings to find aesthetic value in their form, sound and inflection. His poetry thus emerges from an abstract space akin to that of Dash and Jensen, transforming and transmitting nebulous ideas and concepts through personal experience and philosophies.


1 “Alfred Jensen’s Diagrams,” in Alfred Jensen: Concordance, eds. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2003).
2 THERE WAS A BAD TREE catalogue essay, Pace London 2014.
3 “John Giorno” by Marcus Boon. Bomb. Fall 2008.