ADOLPH GOTTLIEB: VITAL IMAGES

Pace is pleased to present Vital Images, an exhibition of late paintings, works on paper, and sculpture by Adolph Gottlieb.

November 15 – December 21, 2024

Beginning his career as an artist in New York in the 1920s, Gottlieb would become one of the founding members of The Ten, a group of artists devoted to expressionist and abstract painting, in 1935. Eight years later, he helped establish another group of abstract painters, The New York Artist Painters, which included Mark Rothko, John Graham, and George L. K. Morris. In 1943, Gottlieb co-authored and published a letter with Rothko in The New York Times, expressing what is now considered the first formal statement of the concerns of Abstract Expressionism.

Pace’s exhibition of Gottlieb’s work in New York takes its title from a 1972 interview with the artist, published in The New York Times on the occasion of his last gallery show, which was mounted at Marlborough Gallery. “They are vital images to me,” Gottlieb said of his work. “I continue to project them as I feel them.”

The presentation focuses on how Gottlieb’s lifelong explorations of abstraction and its capabilities evolved during the later years of his life and career. Following a 1968 exhibition that filled both the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, he began to explore sculpture for the first time. A stroke he suffered in 1971 left him with only the use of his right arm and put him face-to-face with an existential challenge that he embraced as a means to move forward. Aware that his time was limited, Gottlieb set out to expand and refine the ideas about abstraction that he’d been developing for over 50 years. Equipped with his vision and imagination, he saw art as a life-giving force, a source of renewal as he sharpened his focus and advanced the practice that defined his life.

“What's going into it is what I'm looking for when I'm doing the painting—those things which I don't know,” Gottlieb said in a 1965 interview. “In other words, I'm feeling my way and then I find something—and there to my surprise is something that wasn't in the world before, and this can become more and more refined and subtle.”