NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery announces Grounded, an exhibition featuring a dynamic selection of floor-based sculpture by seminal figures in modern and contemporary art. The exhibition will present work from 1967 to 2013 by artists including Carl Andre, John Chamberlain, Tara Donovan, Tom Friedman, Tim Hawkinson, Maya Lin, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Joel Shapiro, Kiki Smith, Keith Tyson, and Fred Wilson. Grounded will be on view at 534 West 25th Street from January 16 through February 14, 2014.
In 1965, Carl Andre challenged preconceived notions of sculpture by placing work flat on the floor in his first public exhibition, Shape and Structure. The exhibition invited visitors to walk onto the sculpture to consider the work from a new perspective and experience its material contrast to the floor. He was part of a group of artists who revolutionized sculpture in the 1960s and became known for his simple linear and grid-format works. In this exhibition, Pace will present the artist’s early work 16 Pieces of Slate (1967).
In addition to this minimalist work by Carl Andre will be a cast iron sculpture by Joel Shapiro. Known for his abstract sculptures of simple geometric forms, the artist explores the expressive quality of the rectangle along two planes in this untitled work from 1982-83.
Pace will also present Soft Shuttlecock, Study (1994) by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. During their 33-year collaboration, the husband and wife team have garnered attention for their playful sculptures of ordinary objects on a monumental scale. Here, Oldenburg and van Bruggen exaggerate the scale of the badminton birdie from 2 to 80 inches in diameter. Comprised of canvas and wood painted with latex, the shuttlecock’s conical shape is deflated, grounding this traditionally aerodynamic vessel to the floor. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented this work in New York as part of the 1995 retrospective, Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology. For the occasion of that exhibition, the artists created a monumental Soft Shuttlecock spanning 32 feet long and six feet in diameter which appeared suspended from the museum’s skylight with its feathers draped over the railings of the building’s renowned rotunda.
Like Oldenburg and van Bruggen, Tara Donovan transforms the ordinary through scale and repetition in her floor sculpture Colony (2004). Resembling clusters of cells and organisms in nature, the sculpture features hundreds of pencils shortened to varying lengths in a formation that sprawls more than 11 feet wide. In 2010, the Indianapolis Museum of Art presented this sculpture in a major solo exhibition of the artist’s work.
Exhibited in New York for the first time will be Kiki Smith’s Stars and Scat (1996). Reflecting on the infinity of space and an exploration of the earth as well worlds above and below, the artist presents a plane of Nepalese paper adorned with more than 860 bronze scat elements and 50 Schott crystal stars. Also on view will be Fred Wilson’s glass Melt / Spurt (2009). Born and based in the Bronx, Wilson’s work encourages viewers to reconsider social and historical narratives and raises critical questions about the politics of erasure and exclusion. In this work, white glass appears melted on the floor in contrast to a black teardrop.
Employing technological methods to study and visualize topographies and geographic phenomena, Maya Lin creates sculptures that interpret the natural world in a scale that we can see and understand. Included in Grounded will be the artist’s 106° East Meridian (2013) which conceptualizes the longitudinal degree that runs through Manhattan in 14 feet of Vermont Danby marble.
Other works on view will be Geno Pheno Sculpture: “If That Then This” (2005) by British artist Keith Tyson and Tim Hawkinson’s Monkey Brains (2007). Tom Friedman’s Untitled (2002) featuring scattered elements of clay gravel will also be on view.
Pace Gallery will present solo exhibitions of work by Tara Donovan, Kiki Smith and Joel Shapiro in New York this spring.
