ARLENE SHECHET: BEYOND BELIEF

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of work by American artist Arlene Shechet at its recently opened Tokyo gallery in Azabudai Hills: Arlene Shechet: Beyond Belief.

November 1 – December 21, 2024

Born in New York City in 1951 and now based in upstate New York, Shechet is widely known for her genre-defying ceramics and evocatively titled hybrid sculptures that combine steel, clay, and wood. Simultaneously organic and architectural, her works invent new vocabularies and push the boundaries of sculpture and space. Uniting seemingly disparate shapes, colors, and materials, Shechet’s works, while abstract, are imbued with psychological and emotional resonances to invite reflection and empathy.

The artist’s exhibition in Tokyo features new and recent works that ride the edge between stillness and motion, much like that of the Japanese art and material culture that has long inspired her. Shechet engages in a spirited back and forth with her works, embracing improvisation and chance as she brings her complex compositions into being. Fusing the language of the natural world with that of built architectural spaces, she makes sculptures that unearth the expressive potential of material, color, and form, forcing us to sit with—and move around—their contradictions.

She is represented in major museum collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

Shechet’s interest in the relationship between sculpture and drawing is made ever more apparent with the exhibition’s inclusion of new, never- before-exhibited works on paper produced by the artist this year, as well as a 1997 work on handmade Abaca paper and textile tapestries from 2019.