Pace at Art Basel Miami Beach

Pace is pleased to announce details of its presentation at the 2022 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach and its participation in an off-site NFT exhibition that will take place in Downtown Miami during the fair.

The gallery’s booth will feature pieces by contemporary artists across Pace’s program—including Lynda Benglis, DRIFT, Torkwase Dyson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Sonia Gomes, Robert Irwin, Matthew Day Jackson, Jeff Koons, Robert Longo, Beatriz Milhazes, Julian Schnabel, and Lee Ufan—alongside masterpieces by 20th century figures John Chamberlain, Keith Haring, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Pousette-Dart, Antoni Tàpies, Andy Warhol, and John Wesley, among others.

A highlight of Pace’s Art Basel Miami Beach booth will be the first US presentation of Jeff Koons’s polychromed bronze sculpture Nike Sneakers (N110 D/MS/X) (2020-22), which was developed for the artist’s recent solo #show at the DESTE Foundation’s Project Space in Hydra, Greece. This dynamic work reflects Koons’s longstanding engagement with popular culture as well as notions of aspiration and accomplishment. The sculpture can be understood in conversation with Koons’s iconic Equilibrium works—highly innovative installations informed by the work of Marcel Duchamp that feature basketballs in the centers of water-filled tanks—and his Nike posters. In 2023, Koons will open his first major solo exhibition with Pace in Los Angeles.

Study for Colossal Ashtray – Model (1974-75), a steel sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, a leading figure of Pop Art movement who died this year at age 93, will also figure prominently on Pace’s booth at the fair. Combining simple geometric forms that stand in for discarded cigarettes and an ashtray, this sculpture exemplifies Oldenburg’s ability to transform familiar objects, forms, and materials into animated sculptural entities. The artist is widely celebrated for his large-scale public projects around the world—which he realized with his wife and longtime collaborator Coosje van Bruggen—and Study for Colossal Ashtray – Model sheds light on his process for creating these monumental odes to the playfulness of the everyday.

Artists with recent and ongoing exhibitions at Pace’s US locations will feature on the gallery’s Art Basel Miami Beach booth. Pace’s presentation at the fair will include a 2019 bronze sculpture by Lynda Benglis, whose solo exhibition at the gallery’s Palm Beach space will be on view from November 30 to December 31, bringing together several bodies of work that reflect the breadth of the artist’s practice. Paintings by Antoni Tàpies and Beatriz Milhazes, who were the subjects of solo exhibitions with Pace in New York this fall, will also be shown on the gallery’s booth. A hanging sculpture by Sonia Gomes, a new painting by Torkwase Dyson, and a 1957 painting by Richard Pousette-Dart—all of whom have solo exhibitions on view at Pace in New York concurrently with the fair—will be displayed along with a monumental charcoal drawing of Yankee Stadium by Robert Longo, whose solo #show at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery continues through December 17.

Among the major contemporary works in the gallery’s Art Basel Miami Beach presentation will be a 2021 sculpture from Robert Irwin’s ongoing Unlight series, in which the artist engages with the experiential possibilities of ambient illumination, shadow, and tonality. Challenging viewers to see their environments in new and unexpected ways, this work, titled “C and C” (Complex/Coherent), incorporates constellations of unlit fluorescent fixtures and tubes, installed in vertical rows directly on the booth’s wall. A new documentary tracing Irwin’s career, A Desert of Pure Feeling, had its world premiere at the 13th annual edition of the DOC NYC festival this November.

Contemporary highlights also include a new interactive work by the artist duo DRIFT, displayed on the booth’s outside wall; a new, never before seen sculpture by Elmgreen & Dragset; a new three-panel landscape painting by Matthew Day Jackson, who joined Pace’s program in 2022; JR’s politically resonant collage The Gun Chronicles: A Story of America, Work in Progress #3, USA (2018) and his dynamic photo Trompe l'oeil, Greetings from Giza, 24 Octobre 2021, 16h46, Giza, Egypte (2021); a painting created this year by Maysha Mohamedi, who is newly represented in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; a vibrant 2022 painting by Julian Schnabel; a 2022 canvas by Lee Ufan, who recently opened an extension of his foundation in Arles, France; and a Murano glass and wood sculpture by Fred Wilson.

The booth will also showcase John Chamberlain’s 2005 painted and chromed steel sculpture Rev. E. Piscpalian Swifty, which features lively plays of color; Keith Haring’s 1982 steel and enamel sculpture Baby; a dynamic 1987 wall-mounted gold anodized aluminum sculpture by Donald Judd; an iconic Flowers painting created by Andy Warhol in 1964; and John Wesley’s 1996 horizontally oriented painting Show Girls, which depicts the semi-obscured faces of two women and exemplifies the artist’s ability to imbue his figurations with mystery and humanity.

Beyond the fair, JR will bring his participatory Chronicles project, through which he creates murals celebrating the cultural landscapes of major cities, to Miami—his resulting mural, which will feature collaged portraits of locals captured by the artist in his roaming studio from November 18 to 29, will be unveiled in the city in the coming months. The experimental art collective Random International, known for its large-scale, interactive works, will present its new installation Living Room, commissioned by Aorist and presented in partnership with Faena Art, in a purpose-built pavilion at Faena Beach from November 29 to December 4.

On Thursday, December 1, web3 projects by Tara Donovan, John Gerrard, and Loie Hollowell, released this year as part of a multifaceted partnership between Pace Verso, the gallery’s web3 hub, and the leading generative art platform Art Blocks, will be exhibited in The Gateway: A Web3 Metropolis, a sprawling NFT event in Downtown Miami organized by the digital platform nft now and running concurrently with Art Basel Miami Beach. This showing of NFT projects from the Art Blocks x Pace Verso partnership, which encompasses NFT releases, exhibitions, and community programming, will be presented during Art Blocks’s week-long immersive activation in The Gateway: A Web3 Metropolis.

Open to the public and running from November 29 to December 3, The Gateway: A Web3 Metropolis will span 12 buildings and two city blocks in Downtown Miami, spotlighting the work of artists, performers, speakers, and other members of the web3 community. To learn more and RSVP for a free ticket to the event, please visit nftnow.com/the-gateway-2022.

In addition, Random International’s new virtual sculpture developed as part of its recently released generative NFT collection Life in Our Minds—created in collaboration with multidisciplinary digital artist Danil Krivoruchko and co-produced by Pace Verso, the web3 hub of #pacegallery, and Snark.art’s OG.Art NFT platform—will be the top lot in Next Wave: The Miami Edit, a curated, fully on-chain sale by Christie’s 3.0. Titled Mother Flock, this evolving, interactive work derives its source data from the individual NFTs in the Life in Our Minds project. Viewers can physically manipulate a flock of thousands of swarming pieces of bird-like origami in Mother Flock. Bidding in Next Wave: The Miami Edit will be open on Christie’s 3.0 from November 30 to December 7. To learn more about the Life in Our Minds collection, please visit og.art/collections/liom.