SPACES BETWEEN THE LINES
Pace is pleased to present a two-artist exhibition of work by Alicja Kwade and Agnes Martin at its Los Angeles space. This will be Kwade’s first significant presentation of new work in Los Angeles and her first major exhibition with Pace since joining the gallery in 2023.
May 18 - June 29, 2024
Kwade is known internationally for sculptures, large-scale public installations, films, photographs, and works on paper that engage poetically and critically with scientific and philosophical concepts. Through a distinctive vocabulary encompassing reflection, repetition, and the manipulation of everyday objects and natural materials, the artist raises questions about structures and systems that govern and shape our daily lives.
The result of a longstanding conversation that Kwade has undertaken with Glimcher around the work of Agnes Martin, who was a close friend of Glimcher and whom he has represented since 1974, the exhibition at Pace’s LA gallery centers on the affinities and intersections between Kwade’s artistic concerns and those of Martin.
For both artists, ordered, mathematical systems, often expressed through their use of line, are integral to their approaches to artmaking. On a formal level, enactments of balance, negotiations of symmetry and non-symmetry, and explorations of liminal, in-between spaces cut across their works.
Two new large-scaled sculptures by Kwade—which are related to her ParaPivot series—will anchor the exhibition. In these works, titled Distorted Dream (2024) and Distorted Day (2024), carved stone orbs appear to float within a framework of polished steel plates and powder-coated steel frames, which intersect at oblique angles.
Highlights in the exhibition also include Martin’s painting, The Sea (2003), the only entirely black painting the artist ever made. In this composition, which Martin produced a year before her death, minutely incised horizontal lines of equal weights are painstakingly carved into the painted surface, producing a humming, vibratory effect reminiscent of flowing water.
Like Kwade’s sculptures— whose open voids produce shifting views of Martin’s painting as viewers circumnavigate the gallery space—this painting, like the other works of Martin included in the exhibition, celebrates art’s phenomenological and perceptual powers.