ALICJA KWADE, AGNES MARTIN

Kwade is known internationally for sculptures, large-scale public installations, films, photographs, and works onpaper that engage poetically and critically with scientific and philosophical concepts. Through a distinctivevocabulary encompassing reflection, repetition, and the manipulation of everyday objects and natural materials, theartist raises questions about structures and systems that govern and shape our daily lives. In her contemplativeworks, which dismantle boundaries of perception, she challenges commonly accepted ideas and beliefs whileproposing new modes of seeing and understanding reality.

The result of a longstanding conversation that Kwade has undertaken with Glimcher around the work of AgnesMartin, who was a close friend of Glimcher and whom he has represented since 1974, the exhibition at Pace’s LAgallery centres on the affinities and intersections between Kwade’s artistic concerns and those of Martin. Althoughseparated by generations, several threads run through both artists’ practices—in particular, their focus on time andtemporality as an organising principle of perceptual experience. These artists also share a fascination with therelationship between truth and beauty. While Kwade’s work is often grounded by a conceptual armature, Martinsought to express a transcendental quietude and purity through painting. For both artists, ordered, mathematicalsystems, often expressed through their use of line, are integral to their approaches to artmaking. On a formal level,enactments of balance, negotiations of symmetry and non-symmetry, and explorations of liminal, in-between spacescut across their works.

‘For some time, I have been interested in a dialogue between Agnes Martin’s paintings and the sculptures of AlicjaKwade,’ Glimcher says of the exhibition, ‘Both artists have been involved in the possibilities of line, both bring ameditative sensibility, and both are interested in questions of time. Both make works that reveal themselves slowly,with time. I have always felt Agnes’s work is closer to music than it is to traditional painting, and with Alicja, there is aparallel sense of adjacency with other modes of perception.’

Two new large-scaled sculptures by Kwade—which are related to her ParaPivot series—will anchor the exhibition. Inthese works, titled Distorted Dream (2024) and Distorted Day (2024), carved stone orbs appear to float within aframework of polished steel plates and powder-coated steel frames, which intersect at oblique angles. Reflecting herinterest in ancient astronomy, Kwade’s ParaPivot sculptures suggest imagined solar systems realised in miniature, inwhich steel supports chart the orbital pathways of planetary bodies. Meanwhile, the artist’s large-scale Jo’s snow(2023) sculptures, which consist of sculpted marble forms that naturalistically resemble piles of partially melted snow,will be on view in the gallery’s courtyard, installed across the grassy outdoor space.

Highlights in the exhibition also include Martin’s painting, The Sea (2003), the only entirely black painting the artistever made. In this composition, which Martin produced a year before her death, minutely incised horizontal lines ofequal weights are painstakingly carved into the painted surface, producing a humming, vibratory effect reminiscent offlowing water. But Martin’s painting is in no way representational—she was interested, instead, in marking time in herwork, creating material and durational encounters between her own body and the canvas. Like Kwade’s sculptures—whose open voids produce shifting views of Martin’s painting as viewers circumnavigate the gallery space—thispainting, like the other works of Martin included in the exhibition, celebrates art’s phenomenological and perceptualpowers.

Pace’s exhibition in LA coincides with Kwade’s solo presentation at the Voorlinden Museum in the Netherlands,running through June 9. Among other recent presentations around the world, her work figured in the 2022 edition ofDesert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia and the 57th Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva, in 2017.

Press release courtesy Pace Gallery