NEW YORK, NY.- Pace will present Vital Images, an exhibition of late paintings, works on paper, and sculpture by Adolph Gottlieb, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York.

Running from November 14 to December 21, this show will spotlight paintings created by the artist in the final years of his life. Holistically, the exhibition will reveal the intense ambition and formal refinement that motivated Gottlieb’s practice in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Beginning his career as an artist in New York in the 1920s, Gottlieb would become one of the founding members of The Ten, a group of artists devoted to expressionist and abstract painting, in 1935. Eight years later, he helped establish another group of abstract painters, The New York Artist Painters, which included Mark Rothko, John Graham, and George L. K. Morris. In 1943, Gottlieb co-authored and published a letter with Rothko in The New York Times, expressing what is now considered the first formal statement of the concerns of Abstract Expressionism.

Pace’s upcoming exhibition of Gottlieb’s work in New York takes its title from a 1972 interview with the artist, published in The New York Times on the occasion of his last gallery show, which was mounted at Marlborough Gallery. “They are vital images to me,” Gottlieb said of his work. “I continue to project them as I feel them.”

The presentation will focus on how Gottlieb’s lifelong explorations of abstraction and its capabilities evolved during the later years of his life and career. Following a 1968 exhibition that filled both the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, he began to explore sculpture for the first time. A stroke he suffered in 1971 left him with only the use of his right arm and put him face-to-face with an existential challenge that he embraced as a means to move forward. Aware that his time was limited, Gottlieb set out to expand and refine the ideas about abstraction that he’d been developing for over 50 years. Equipped with his vision and imagination, he saw art as a life-giving force, a source of renewal as he sharpened his focus and advanced the practice that defined his life.

Remarkably, Gottlieb produced his largest-ever canvas, Triptych, a rarely exhibited three-panel composition, in 1971. This monumental composition—which measures 7.5 feet tall and 19 feet long—will figure in Vital Images at Pace, presented in conversation with paintings and works on paper dating between 1970 and 1973. The exhibition will also include Oval Slanted, a rare polychrome steel sculpture from 1968, in which the artist took up new experimentations with his visual vocabulary in three dimensional terms. Together, these late works reflect Gottlieb’s life-long practice of creating images and exploring and re-thinking them over time, assessing his process and progress time and again.

“What's going into it is what I'm looking for when I'm doing the painting—those things which I don't know,” Gottlieb said in a 1965 interview. “In other words, I'm feeling my way and then I find something—and there to my surprise is something that wasn't in the world before, and this can become more and more refined and subtle.”