LOUISE NEVELSON

The first-ever solo exhibition of Nevelson’s work in Seoul, this exhibition will shed light on the centrality of collage to the artist’s process, tracing her lifetime of rigorous formal experimentation and exploring her metaphysical focus on shadow, which she described as “the fourth dimension.” Louise Nevelson: The Fourth Dimension is presented on the occasion of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions of work by major 20th century artists—with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships—at its spaces around the world.

Rooted in the legacies of Cubism and Constructivism, Nevelson’s artworks were widely celebrated during her lifetime for incorporating unexpected combinations of materials and forms. As part of her distinctive approach to abstraction, the artist often investigated the visual possibilities of compartmentalized elements and forms, a strategy that recurs across her sculpture, assemblage, collage, and jewelry making. Throughout her career, Nevelson nurtured an artistic practice marked by tireless and vigorous experimentation with materiality, shape, and space. Shadows are a recurrent focus in Nevelson’s artistic language. “I think that the shadow, let’s say, for a better word, is the fourth dimension,” she explained. “That shadow I make forms out of is just not a fleeting shadow but it has as much form as a cubistic form would have. It has forms and I give them forms and to me they’re much more exciting than anything that I see on earth.”

The artist’s daily act of creating abstractions in her collages, which she kept mostly secret during her lifetime, provided a new avenue for explorations of the texture and density of shadow as a function of light, reflection, and line. Inextricably linked with her sculptural practice, these works—which incorporate combinations of metal, cardboard, sandpaper, tape, wood, wire, spray paint, printed paper, and newspaper—reflect her intense interest in materiality. Collage, for Nevelson, was a language of radical honesty in which materials laid bare the stories of their origins. Tearing and recombining traces of the past to produce a raw, unfiltered beauty, she developed an aesthetic of fragmentation and reassembly that animated the spirit of all her work as an artist.