INNER COSMOS, OUTER UNIVERSE
Pace is pleased to announce Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe. This exhibition will include over thirty paintings, sculptures, textiles, and works on paper, all of which investigate structures of being and nothingness.
March 15 – May 4, 2024
Spanning over eight decades of artmaking, the works in Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe encompass a broad range of artistic responses to the celestial imagination over the past century, both literally and metaphorically. Recalling the polished chrome and sleek surfaces of space-age design, the exhibition will include sculptures by Alexander Calder, Jeff Koons, Alicja Kwade, and Leo Villareal.
Chromatic eruptions course through works by Latifa Echakhch, Sonia Gomes, Hermann Nitsch, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Lucas Samaras, suggesting nebulae that refract spectrums of speckled colour. Other, more oblique references to the cosmos recur in works by Torkwase Dyson, Adolph Gottlieb, Matthew Day Jackson, Robert Longo, Robert Rauschenberg, Arlene Shechet, Kiki Smith, and Mika Tajima, which will also be featured in the show.
Many of the works in Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe are united by the formal motif of the circle. This simple geometric shape, which can be found depicted in visual art from pre-historic sites across the globe, commonly signifies the infinite and cyclical nature of existence. Yet it also figures in pictorial depictions of basic elements invisible to the human eye: molecules, for example, and the atoms that form them are typically represented as spherical clusters.
Richard Pousette-Dart’s Space Continuum, Part II (1989), featured in the exhibition, is composed of fields of the artist’s characteristic pointillist marks that coalesce into kaleidoscopic arrangements of whorls and shapes suggestive of stellar clusters, at once atomic and celestial.
Sculptural works in Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe bridge the effervescence of the celestial with the solidity of geology. In Kiki Smith’s Standing Stars II (2013), seven- and nine-pointed stars burst skyward from a bronze base. Sungrazer I (2018), also by Smith, depicts a shooting star in earthy hues, with single stalks of wheat cast on its surface as if emerging from the soil itself.
Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball (Bottlerack) (2016) invites viewers to inhabit the contemplative depths of reflection, meditating on their own place within the cosmic expanse, and, in doing so, becoming part of the artwork itself. In a seeming inversion of Koons’s crowning Gazing Ball, a stitched azure sphere pendulates from the apex of Sonia Gomes’s Nebulosa 1 (2022). Gomes's sculpture incorporates familiar textiles and patterns—checkered plaid, polka dots, a lace doily—yet exudes an organic and ethereal quality.