NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery is presenting Saul Steinberg: Imagined Interiors, the first in a series of thematic and solo exhibitions created exclusively for the gallery’s online platform to be mounted during this unprecedented period of temporary closures. Curated by Michaëla Mohrmann, Associate Curatorial Director at Pace, Imagined Interiors explores drawings, collages, and photographs by Saul Steinberg that center on the theme of domesticity and the nature of interior spaces as ideal sites for introspection and creativity, resonating with the current unique human experience many are navigating around the world. The exhibition will be on view through Pace’s online viewing room platform for a two-week period from March 23 – April 6, 2020.
"My purpose is to transform an idea that I had into a drawing. I am not so preoccupied by the outside world. I’m preoccupied with my own inside world.” —Steinberg
Steinberg redefined the possibilities of drawing, casting it as a philosophical investigation, “a way of reasoning on paper.” He earned critical acclaim as a modernist artist in the post-war period, while his numerous drawings and covers for The New Yorker made him dear to a broad American public—the people whose daily lives and customs became the subject of his art. Through a series of five groupings—Creative Pursuits at Home, In Good Company: Pets, Portals to Other Worlds, The Fantastic Everyday, and At Home in Public—Mohrmann has assembled an expansive yet intimate online exhibition of Steinberg’s ingenious experiments with drawing and other media, addressing the private sphere in relation to modern phenomena such as urbanization.
Drawing connections between Steinberg’s life and work, the exhibition is accompanied by archival imagery of the artist at his home and studio in Amagansett, New York. It also features an enhanced audio-visual user experience that includes Charles Louise Ambroise Thomas's "Gavotte" from the opera Mignon—a composition for the violin referenced in one of Steinberg's drawings—and a poem by William Carlos Willams, lending rich context to the works on view. Through styles exuding dynamic vitality and autobiographical details evocative of distant locations—from his hometown in Romania to Edo period Japan—Steinberg’s work unearths the creative possibilities and hidden horizons within one’s home.
In addition to Imagined Interiors, Pace will present several digital exhibitions over the course of the coming weeks, including a group exhibition dedicated to ceramics, an exhibition of works inspired by nature, and a focus on photography on the topic of America’s cultural history, that primarily engage with human experience in this climate of solitary interconnection.
Saul Steinberg (b. 1914, Râmnicul Sarat, Romania; d. 1999, New York) produced drawings, sculptures, photographs, and collages that continue to elicit critical contemplation. Having studied architecture in Milan, he fled wartime Italy in 1941 and became an American citizen two years later. Influenced by Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, and Pop, Steinberg’s varied output reflects the defiant humor, curiosity, and modernist attitude of an artist trying to make sense of the chaotic postwar period. Marked by a self-aware wit, his work embraces double meanings and philosophical content expressed through graphic means. Widely celebrated for his contributions to The New Yorker, Steinberg’s art became an exploration of social and political systems, language, and art itself.
