NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery announced its participation in Art Basel Paris, where it will present Mystic Sugar, an exhibition curated by acclaimed artist Paulina Olowska. Running from October 18 to 20 in the newly renovated Grand Palais, Pace’s booth (A30) will feature a selection of works by Louise Nevelson, Kiki Smith, Lucas Samaras, and Olowska herself. Drawing on representations of mysticism, femininity, and transformation, the exhibition will explore the intersections between esotericism and the natural world, offering a contemporary reappraisal of the witch as a powerful symbol of liberation and otherworldly perception.
Olowska’s curation, rooted in her deep engagement with forgotten or neglected cultures, will bring together paintings, sculptures, reliefs, and textiles to explore poetic overlaps in the lives and work of Nevelson, Smith, and Samaras. Titled for its connotations both of pleasure and capacity to transform, Mystic Sugar will present the ‘witch’ not merely as folkloric figure, but as an embodiment of feminine liberation. For Olowska, witchhood is an expansive category that abandons patriarchal life for the pastoral, the ethereal, and the unseen.
The diverse works on view in Paris are united in celebrating a sensorial, reciprocal relationship with nature, and embody pioneering attitudes toward the liberation of the self and the world around us. While exploring distinct lines of enquiry, all four artists champion the use of natural materials to prompt sensual, emotional, and imaginative responses from their viewers. From the bronze and silver of Smith’s animal sculptures to Samaras’s jewel-encrusted boxes, the works included in Mystic Sugar are imbued with affective potency.
Paulina Olowska
Paulina Olowska’s engagement with feminine mysticism reflects her broader interest in Slavic mythology and the natural world. Expansive and adaptable, her imagined witch is in commune with her surroundings, and her physical and psychic self. Olowska positions herself within a broad genealogy of creators, particularly those whose work engages with the mystical. Both Smith and Nevelson have profoundly influenced Olowska and her contemporaries, inspiring her to explore the power of self-expression and the rich symbolism of the feminine.
For Pace’s Paris presentation, Olowska has created a series of new paintings that interweave thematic elements from the practices of Samaras, Smith, and Nevelson. Two of these works, The Whitney Show (After Diana MacKown) and Louise at Claude Bernard (After Diana MacKown) (both 2024), depict Nevelson standing in front of her artworks. Renowned during her lifetime for her distinct sense of style, Nevelson’s commanding presence and sartorial grandeur coalesce with the surrounding sculptures. Through Olowska’s painterly touch, both artist and artwork merge into a vivid, living record.
Louise Nevelson
Louise Nevelson’s monumental, abstract expressionist sculptures anchor Pace’s presentation for Art Basel Paris. Shrouded in darkness, works such as Untitled (1968-72) absorb light, creating a void that invites contemplation of the unseen. Nevelson’s use of black—a color often linked to the occult—serves as a powerful metaphor for hidden forces and the energies that reside in the spaces between reality and perception.
Paul Richard’s 1988 obituary of Nevelson framed her as a witch, a characterization rooted in her nocturnal working habits and solitary creative process. While this portrayal is both lingering and romantic, it is also reductive. As Catherine Quan Damman notes, Nevelson was often cast as a sorceress or witch, her artistic identity both hyperbolically feminized and paradoxically deemed too masculine for her time. In Mystic Sugar, the concept of witchcraft in Nevelson’s work is reclaimed, not as a pejorative label imposed by critics, but rather as an index of the potent symbolic energies of her chosen palette. Though Nevelson herself eschewed the label of “feminist,” this reclamation nevertheless pays homage to her considerable achievements in liberating feminine power from patriarchal constraints.
Kiki Smith
Throughout her career, the work of Kiki Smith has placed women at the center of her artistic iconography. Long relegated to the margins of history, Smith’s art restores women to their central role. In her practice, Smith conjures a poetics and a politics of body, mortality, and regeneration, evoking the interconnection of spirituality and the natural world. By mining and reworking cosmological stories, myths of creation, folklore, and biblical legends, Smith recovers and elevates the everyday feminine experience to a position of reverence. Her installation Sibyls (2005), on view in Paris, is composed of sixteen individual mirrors that each depict a woman in an act of work, play, rest, or care. Recalling the prophetesses of Ancient Greece, these women, rendered in stained glass and gold leaf—the medium of ecclesiastical adoration—are bestowed belated veneration.
Other sculptures and tapestries by Smith included in Mystic Sugar depict birds, snakes, stars, and trees that together embody the deep ties between humanity and nature. Like the witch’s ‘familiar’—a spiritual companion, often embodied as a cat or other animal, which accompanies and attends her—Smith’s creatures serve as spiritual guides between corporeal and metaphysical worlds.
Lucas Samaras
The shapeshifting and protean work of Lucas Samaras is represented in Mystic Sugar by a selection of pastels on paper and sculptures from throughout his eight-decade career, throughout which the human body offers a source of endless artistic possibility. Samaras’s work often conveys a sense of the surreal, where the ordinary becomes unnameable and intimately strange. United by a career-long quest for self-reflection, each artwork by Samaras is a kind of personal relic—a “self-object” entombed with symbolic meaning. This pursuit of the surreal, of making the familiar unfamiliar, draws viewers into Samaras’s world of enigmatic, erotic sensuousness.
The presentation in Paris will feature two of Samaras’s iconic wire Chairs, sculptures that represent a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, when he began exploring the transformation of everyday objects into works of art. Working with materials like fabric, wire mesh, and mirrored glass, Samaras transmuted utilitarian forms into fantastical creations, producing a dreamlike sense of metamorphosis. Samaras remarked that his Chairs and other works from his Transformation series negate “the possibility of a single Platonic ideal acting as a measure for any physical thing.” In works like Wire Chair with Objects (Caterpillar) (1986), Samaras combines the refined lines of a dining chair with cruder elements— pencils, erasers, beads, pins, mirror, eggbeaters, and wire hangers—creating an assemblage at once delicate and jarring. These chairs, much like his drawings, are rendered with a wide variety of gestures, ranging from minute, precise touches to bold, expressive strokes.
Pushing his exploration of the seductive and the grotesque still further, Box #97 (1977), also on view in Paris, explores the interplay between interiority and exteriority, revealing layers of hidden meaning through intricate surfaces encrusted with metal pins and colored yarn. While related to radical movements like Fluxus and Happenings, Samaras’s boxes are not reactions against traditional forms but instead serve as three-dimensional projections of the artist himself. His early boxes (1960–68) had an aggressive, surrealist quality, often featuring sharp elements. By the late 1960s, these works shifted to employ softer materials. Of these works, Samaras noted, "You can threaten people in different ways, using color or overelaboration."
